Category: Israel 2003-08

The war comes home for Olmert

The war that Ehud Omert launched against Lebanon on July 12 is now coming home to haunt him. (Even if many of the young men whom he sent to fight it will never be able to do so.)
Haaretz’s Nir Hasson writes in Thursday’s paper that the parents of at least three of the IDF soldiers who were killed in Lebanon have now joined with the angry reservists from the Alexandroni brigade in calling for Omert’s speedy resignation.
Hasson writes:

    The bereaved families and the reservists are planning to hold a protest march on Friday, from the cemetery in Mazkeret Batya where Rafael is buried to Jerusalem. There they plan to present Prime Minister Ehud Olmert with a letter calling for his resignation.
    At last night’s meeting, the participants signed a letter stating, “we, the reserve soldiers who returned from the last war in Lebanon, and we, the parents who lost our sons in this war, call on the prime minister and defense minister: You have failed – take responsibility – resign. The pain you caused us by your failure has succeeded in unifying us. In the names of our comrades who did not return from battle we declare: We will not give up, we will not cease our struggle until those responsible accept responsibility for their deeds. We call on the prime minister: Don’t exhaust us. We have suffered enough, we have just returned as soldiers from the battle. We have just entered the fog of the battle of bereavement. Spare us at least this struggle. Resign immediately.”

My condolences to the bereaved parents. They seem stuck in exactly the same terrible situation that the families of US soldiers killed during George Bush’s senseless and aggressive war against Iraq have been stuck in. Except I guess that most of the killed Israeli soldiers were serving under a mandatory reserve-service plan, while the US soldiers are all “volunteers”.
I’m not sure how much difference that makes to a bereaved parent, though. Anyone?

More on the Marjayoun convoy, Israel’s attacks on civilians

Bob Fisk, writing in today’s Independent, gives these details about the fateful “Marjayoun convoy” of August 11:

    “They went so slowly, I was enraged,” a relief worker recalls. “People at friendly villages would come out and give the refugees food and water and want to talk to them and people would stop to greet old friends as if this was tourism. The convoy was only going at five miles an hour. It was getting dark.” The 3,000 refugees now trailed up the Bekaa after nightfall and were approaching the ancient Kifraya vineyards at Joub Jannine when disaster struck them at 8pm.
    “The first bomb hit the second car,” Karamallah Dagher, a reporter for Reuters, said. “I was half way back down the road and my friend Elie Salami was standing there, asking me if I had any spare gasoline. That’s when the second missile struck and Elie’s head and shoulders were blown away. His daughter Sally is 16 and she jumped from the car and cried out: ‘I want my Daddy, I want my Daddy.’ But he was gone.” Speaking of the killings yesterday, Dagher breaks down and cries. He tried to carry his arthritic mother from his own car but she complained that he was hurting her so he put her back in the passenger seat and sat beside her, waiting for a violent death which mercifully never came. But it arrived for Collette Makdissi al-Rashed, wife of the mukhtar, who was beheaded in her Cherokee jeep, and for a member of the Tahta family from from Deir Mimas, and for two other refugees, and for a Lebanese soldier and for 35-year-old Mikhael Jbaili, the Red Cross volunteer from Zahle, who was blasted into the air when a rocket exploded behind him.
    “There was panic,” the Marjayoun mayor, Fouad Hamra, said…

(Hat-tip to Judy for sending that link.)
I haven’t heard any more yet from Colette’s family… I imagine they’ve been busy arranging the funeral and many other things.
Colette was originally from Zahleh, just a few miles further up the Beqaa Valley from the Joub Jannine vineyards. I imagine Zahleh was where the convoy was headed, since the town traditionally had many links with Marjayoun.
I fully support all efforts to conduct an in-depth investigation into how exactly Colette, Elie, and the others were thus murdered, and by whom. In the piece linked to above, Fisk writes:

    There are those who break down when they recall the massacre at Joub Jannine – and there are the Israelis who gave permission to the refugees to leave Marjayoun, who specified what roads they should use, and who then attacked them with pilotless, missile-firing drone aircraft. Five days after being asked to account for the tragedy, they had last night still not bothered to explain how they killed at least seven refugees and wounded 36 others just three days before a UN ceasefire came into effect.

(In fact, at that point on that Friday evening, the negotiations for the ceasefire were already very far advanced, indeed, almost at completion.)
Fisk tells us it was “pilotless, missile-firing drone aircraft” that fired on the convoy. “Pilotless” is a bit of misnomer. Drones don’t have pilots sitting in them; but they do have pilots who sit safely back in some home base and give the drones all their orders, including where to steer to, how to take pictures, and when and where to fire their weapons. It’s not like the Israelis (or Americans, over in Iraq) simply send out squads of killer drones and sit back and let them do whatever they want.
So who were the pilots or controllers of those drones, that evening? On what basis did they command the drones to fire their lethal missiles? What were the “rules of engagement” (or “standing orders”) on the basis of which they fired? Who had defined those standing orders or ROEs? That is what we need to know.
We need to know these things so we can understand more fully the mindset of people who would fire on a completely pre-arranged convoy of civilians heading north up the Beqaa, (with, yes, ahead of them, Lebanese Army people retreating north as per agreement with the IDF, rendering them hors de combat, i.e. under international law ‘noncombatants’.)
Has it become quite “normal” for people in the Israeli armed forces– particularly, their Air Force– to fire on civilians and other noncombatants who are clearly fleeing the battle zone? What does this tell us about the ethics and value of the Israeli armed forces and the society they claim to represent and defend?
Amnesty International has just published an excellent-looking report on the attacks the IDF (and particularly the IAF) launched during the 33-day war against Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure. It is certainly worth reading in full.
In a separate campaign, Amnesty is also calling for immediate investigation of all attacks launched against civilian persons during the war. It notes that,

    In Lebanon, hundreds of civilians were killed by Israeli forces in attacks on residential areas causing massive destruction. Others were killed in attacks on vehicles as villagers were heeding the calls by the Israeli army to leave their homes in South Lebanon… In Israel, some 40 civilians were killed in attacks by Hizbullah on towns and villages, including Haifa, Kiryat Shmona, Nahariya, Safed, Ma’alot and Acre…”

Yes, it would be good to have a broad, even-handed international investigation into the killing of civilian persons (and the destruction of civilian infrastructure) by both sides. There are, of course, a number of issues involved in any such consideration of “evenhandedness”. One is the massive disproportionality between the lethality and the general destructive capability at the disposal of each side. I would love for someone to come up with rough figures for e.g. the total (kilo-)tonnage of TNT-equivalent that was delivered by each side… All we ever hear about in the US is the “thousands” of Hizbullah rockets that zoomed into Israel– without any easily comparable reference to either the number or the explosive capacity of the Israeli munitions (air-dropped, sea-delivered, artillery, etc) that were targeted onto Lebanon.
And when I say “targeted” onto Lebanon, that brings up an additional disparity in capacity between the two sides: the one regarding targeting capability. On the one hand, we have Israel, whose spokespeople routinely claim they are able to bomb with “pinpoint accuracy”– a claim that is, indeed, generally a credible one, even when, say, they’re boming a convoy of noncombatants driving north up the Beqaa, a vital bridge or a power station north of Beirut, or a gathering of other refugees in Qana, etc…
And then there’s Hizbullah.
I know that Hizbullah was able to target one anti-ship missile onto an Israeli navy ship fairly early on, and it also has a very primitive drone capability (not used much, I think, during the recent war.) But the vast majority of those much-hyped “thousands of Hizbullah rockets” launched against israel were (a) of very low explosive power, and (b) barely targettable at all.
“Pipsqueakers”, as Michael Totten has called them.
Here’s what Totten, a strongly pro-Israeli commentator from Oregon, wrote after he toured one of the worst affected “front-line communities” in Israel last Friday:

    I drove to Hezbollah’s most targeted city of Kiryat Shmona to do a little post-war analysis of what had just happened. It looks surprisingly intact from a distance, and even up close the damage is less severe than what I thought it would be.
    I expected to see at least one destroyed house. There may be a destroyed house in there somewhere, but I drove all over and couldn’t find one.
    Katyusha rockets are pipsqueakers    . They don’t feel like pipsqueakers when they’re flying in your direction. But they are. They can’t be aimed worth a damn, and they’ll only do serious damage if they ignite something else after impact, like the gas tank of a car. They have almost no military value at all unless they are fired in barrages at a reasonably close range. From a distance they can only be counted on to break a few things almost at random in the general direction they’re aimed.
    They do break a few things, especially because Hezbollah is clever enough to pack them tight with ball bearings. Kiryat Shmona looks like a city that recently suffered street fights between roving militias with automatic weapons.
    Katyusha shrapnel kills people who aren’t wearing body armor, and wounds those who are. No one wants to be hit with this stuff. But if the side of your building is hit, you can call a repair guy and have it taken care of in one day.

A little different from those entire city-blocks of densely packed high-rises in southern Beirut that were reduced to a level field of smoking rubble by the IDF’s stand-off weapons, don’t you think?
Well, back to Amnesty’s report on Israel’s deliberate destruction of civilian infratsructure (including infrastructure literally vital to the survival of civilians, like water plants, etc.) It included this:

Continue reading “More on the Marjayoun convoy, Israel’s attacks on civilians”

Haunting Images from Israel

Maybe I’m still too human. I resist viewing the many available web pictures of death in Lebanon and Israel in the recent carnage – even as my head tells me I must. As noted here before, the American viewing public had a profoundly sanitized version of the Israeli pounding of Lebanon, while the rest of the world witnessed a steady horrific stream of Lebanese civilian corpses, like the 3 dozen or so children who perished (again) at Qana.
My hesitance stems from analytical awareness of the power of such images to change thinking, unfairly at times, if we do not know the context of a sensational picture. Inevitably, images can be powerful tools, for good or ill, shaping international opinion of a given event. Contrary to Tony Cordesman, that’s why “smart” combatants today energetically endeavor to promote, repress, or sugar coat horrific images to suit their side’s agenda.
Never mind the cerebral level, the pictures from the past six weeks in Lebanon remain – a testament powerfully tugging at the heart and soul, for those with the courage to look. Such a waste!
Yet it wasn’t images of carnage that awoke me last night – like Jefferson’s “firebell in the night.” Instead, I am especially haunted by the memory of very different type of photo that I first saw here and then here.
No, they are not of dead children soaked in blood or caked in chemical ash, and they’re not the images of the broken “ragdoll” bodies of someone’s now departed, beloved child.
The pictures that eat at me even worse than the sight of death are of otherwise cherubic Israeli children writing messages and drawing images on Israeli shells bound for Lebanon.
One side of me still wanted to believe that there has to be an explanation, that these have to be doctored, or even fabricated, or explained away. I wish.
From the checking I’ve done, the photos are indeed legitimate, and different versions of the same scene apparently were taken by different photo services (AP, AFP, Ha’aretz, etc.) on July 17th.
While I am far better at searching for texts and documents via venerable tools like Nexus and Dow, I have a hunch that the original publisher/owners of these photos are shy, at best, about these photos, as I’ve encountered several no longer functioning photo links. Yet I am also learning that several reputable photo web site blogs have featured the photos and now store them in “permanent” links, such as via “Flikr.” See here, here, and here.
I’ve read claims that these photos have been the focus of scores (or more) of blog write-ups. However, it is my sense that the US mainstream media, TV and print, has generally ignored the photos. (Readers please chime in if you have any examples to the contrary.)
Responding to an internet buzz about the photos, no less than the Jerusalem Post (on-line only) on July 23rd sourced Israeli officials to confirm that the “graffitti incident” really did occur, that the photos were of an actual event. Indeed, the Associated Press photos were apparently taken by an Israeli photojournalist, Sebastian Scheiner.
According to the Jerusalem Post, the Israeli army did not condone the children’s shell decorating session. Then again, they obviously did not stop it. The Post cited an un-named official close to Israel’s public relations campaign who said that there was “no way” to frame the incident in a positive light. “Some people are simply irresponsible,” said the official.
That hasn’t stopped some from trying to “spin” it.

Continue reading “Haunting Images from Israel”

160 IDF infantry soldiers accuse their commanders

We are still only 36 days after the start of the 33-day war, and already a group of some 160 IDF infantry soldiers have decided they wanted to join a “demonstration that would call on the resignation of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz.” However, that piece by Nir Hasson in Friday’s HaAretz noted, “their release was put off until Friday, preventing them from reaching the protest.”
Hasson reported these comments from angry soldiers:

    “I’ve been in the army and reserves for 26 years and what happened this time was not merely a fiasco, it was a complete debacle. We felt like tin soldiers in a game of Olmert and Peretz’s assistants and spin masters,” said Avi, a soldier in the brigade…
    “They sent us into a village they knew 15 Hezbollah fighters were holed up in at mid-day, we were like sitting ducks, it was total insanity. Two of our comrades were killed because of that. We are being used as though we were in the Chinese army, where it doesn’t matter how many are killed,” he said.

I note that this was not a classical type of anti-war protest. Hasson wrote:

    A few dozen demonstrators arrived at Rabin Square Thursday to take part in the protest that had been organized on Internet sites.
    They called for Olmert’s resignation and blasted halting the war before its goals were achieved.
    Ariella Miller, one of the protest’s initiators, said she was not acting on behalf of any political body. “We are family people who used the Internet to form a group. When we went to war they promised us to bring back the soldiers and restore Israel’s deterrent force.”

However, the feelings of these soldiers and their readiness to speak to the press about their desire for Olmert’s resignation provide yet more evidence of the political upheaval inside Israel this week.

More on Israeli leadership chaos

Israel’s leadership truly is in chaos. Not only are there all the messy recriminations, charges, and counter-charges over the unsuccessful handling of the war. But in addition we have:
(1) The Chief of Staff’s stock-selling at a time of crisis scandal, as noted here.
(2) “Justice” Minister Haim Ramon reportedly about to be tried for sexually harrassing a female employee. Ramon, who came into Kadima from Labor, was one of the loudest voices in the cabinet calling for a large-scale ground incursion of Lebanon. Was this belligerence a way to deflect attention from what he must have known was an increasing threat of such prosecution?
(3) And now, this report from the usually excellently informed Ari Shavit, stating that Ehud Olmert and his wife,

    will be summoned to an investigation in the State Comptroller’s office within a few days.
    The prime minister and his wife will be presented with these findings: The price they paid for their new house on 8 Cremieux Street in Jerusalem is lower than its market price by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
    The difference between the sum they paid – some $1.2 million – and the house’s value – $1.6-1.8 million – is hard to explain. It raises suspicion that the prime minister and his wife illicitly received about half a million dollars.
    There is another suspicion: The house the Olmerts bought had been earmarked for preservation. Converting a house marked for preservation into a house that can be torn down, rebuilt or expanded requires special and irregular permits from the Jerusalem municipality. There is evidence to support the suspicion that Olmert’s confidants helped the contractor who sold Olmert the house obtain those irregular permits. If this is the case, the real estate deal was probably a bribery deal. The prime minister and his wife will be questioned about that.
    Presumably, the questioning of the Olmerts by State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss’ investigators and his adviser on corruption, retired detective Yaakov Borovsky, will wrap up the comptroller’s investigation.
    The comptroller will present the attorney general with a slim but weighty document. It is very likely that the document will leave Attorney General Menachem Mazuz with no choice but to open a criminal inquiry against the prime minister and his wife.
    It is highly doubtful that Olmert could even temporarily survive such a police probe considering the present public mood. Chances are that within about two months he will no longer be Israel’s prime minister.

I’ll just repeat what I put at the end of my most recent post here:

    I do note… that the disunity in Israel’s national command authorities could allow some devastating military adventurism to arise there. This, in a country with (by conservative estimates) some 100 to 200 nuclear warheads…
    Please, will the adults in the international community pay attention to this risk and exert all possible efforts to end the long-festering irresolution of three vital strands of the Israeli-Arab conflict before things get even worse?

The collapse of decent public values in Israel that I noted here earlier, and the resulting political chaos, leadership fracturing, and all the big risks attendant thereto all seem much worse than I had earlier thought. It is truly time for the adults in an international community that gave this deeply troubled state its original birth certificate back in 1947 to step in and take responsibility for restoring sanity, peace, and hope to a region that has seen none of these qualities in the past few years.

Hizbullah building bridges; Israel’s command authorities fracturing

I just read this Yahoo/AP news report about Lebanese Army units deploying to south Lebanon today, and I clicked onto the slideshow accompanying it. In a number of slides you can see the Army convoys crossing vital bridges across waterways that the Israelis three weeks ago pulverized with their air assault against the country’s infrastructure– and these crossing points had already been rebuilt with temporary but very serviceable-looking replacement structures.
E.g. here, you can see a rather nice-looking emergency bridge that has been put up over the Litani south of Tyr– at the point where just last week we saw desperate aid volunteers handing medical supplies to each across a raging torrent. (Look at the pic before that one, too.) Or this one, which shows the Army convoy crossing what is, I think, the strategically vital Jisr al-Khardali (Mustard Bridge), an area beneath Marjayoun that I know well.
So who do we suppose it was who built these emergency structures? I am almost certain it would have been engineers from Hizbullah’s long-practiced “Jihad al-Buna” (The Jihad of Building) organization.
Hizbullah builds many kinds of bridges, of course– political as well as physical. For example, Juan Cole links to an Arabic-language news report saying that Hizbullah leader Sayed Hasan Nasrullah has defended Lebanon’s “March 14” bloc against Bashar al-Asad’s accusation that they are all just Israeli and American tools.
Right now, Hizbullah’s need to keep good relations with the rest of the Lebanese government evidently outweighs its need to keep good relations with Bashar. Bashar, after all, is not about to cut them off at the knees. Indeed, his support for them will have to (in his own interest) continue and perhaps even grow over the weeks ahead, regardless of what Nasrullah says about him in public. But Nasrullah does need to keep a good working relationship with the March 14 bloc as he shoe-horns Hizbullah into the position he wants it to be in, in south Lebanon and the rest of the country, over the vital days and weeks ahead.
It’s probably worth reiterating that Nasrullah is an extremely astute and experienced political operator within intra-Lebanese politics. ( You can see some description of that in my Boston Review piece.)
Al-Hayat is only one of many newspapers that is reporting [Arabic] today on the deal between Hizbullah and the rest of the Lebanese government that has allowed the Lebanese Army’s rapid deployment to the south and a Hizbullah agreement to keep its weapons south of the Litani hidden (for now).
A future stage of this relationship might indeed involve– as often discussed previously– the incorporation of most or all Hizbullah units into the national army, perhaps in the form of a territorially based reserve or auxiliary force. At a minimum, such a force should have a single, unified command which comes under truly national Lebanese control.
(Interesting, in this context, to see this AP report of the Lebanese authorities having arrested a Lebanese general, Brig. Adnan Daoud, after he was seen on Israeli and Lebanese television last week, schmoozing and jovially drinking tea with Israeli occupation force officers who had just captured his barracks in Marjayoun. Lebanon has, of course, remained in a state of unresolved war with Israel since 1948, and has suffered horrendous damage from repeated Israeli attacks and incursions since 1968.)
Politicians in the west have been so happy in the past to see Lebanon gain its national independence from all foreign tutelage. So if the Lebanese government chooses to establish a territorial or auxiliary force in the way outlined above, then no foreign government would want to interfere with that nationally made decision, I assume?
… Gosh, the news just keeps pouring in, doesn’t it? Here, we learn that those fearsome French who were expected to “lead” or “be the backbone of” the beefed-up UN force are now reported by Le Monde as being prepared to contribute to it a princely “10 officers and 200 military engineers.”
This definitely looks more and more like Round One to Hizbullah. And of course, while Hizbullah’s leadership has been extremely carefully to do what it can to keep its version of “Lebanese national unity” flourishing, and while Hamas and Abu Mazen have also taken a significant new step toward Palestinian national unity, in Israel the highest levels of strategic and military decisionmaking seem to be falling into increasing discord amidst hails of cross-cutting accusations about responsibility for the failure of the 34-day war against Lebanon. (E.g., here and here.)
I do note, however, that the disunity in Israel’s national command authorities could allow some devastating military adventurism to arise there. This, in a country with (by conservative estimates) some 100 to 200 nuclear warheads…
Please, will the adults in the international community pay attention to this risk and exert all possible efforts to end the long-festering irresolution of three vital strands of the Israeli-Arab conflict before things get even worse?

Imshin’s view from north Tel Aviv

I’ve kept the link to Imshin’s blog Not a Fish, Provincially Speaking on my sidebar just about since the beginning of this blog. Even for a good while when Imshin wasn’t posting anything new there I kept the link up, because I like the fresh way she writes about her life as a “sassy Israeli working mother.” And though I frequently disagree with her, there’s a lot of things she has written that I agree with and that make me admire her values and her views
She even put that “Provincially Speaking” subtitle onto her blog after I’d accused her of having a fairly provincial worldview.
Well, another word for provincial could be “grounded”. All well and good.
So I wonder how representative of broader Israeli thinking her view of the recent Israeli assault on Lebanon has been? If it is broadly representative, then that could explain some things that have been going on in Israeli politics that need a lot of further consideration.
Here’s what she was writing August 10th:

    I started this blog in 2002 because I was so upset about the lies being told about Israel all the time. Lies being told and being believed.
    I don’t care any more. It doesn’t matter.
    My mother-in-law often tells about life in Tel Aviv during the 1948 war…
    That war was a fight to survive. A terrible terrible war, killing one percent of the Jewish population and many newcomers, Holocaust survivors fresh off the boats. It was touch and go. Us or them.
    Never since has Israel’s home front been so targetted. Not even when we sat in air shelters here in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War of 1991. Not even near.
    Never, until now.
    This is still a fight to survive. And anyone who thinks differently is deluded.
    Still we’re the bad guys.
    Brave kids are fighting for us in Lebanon, getting wounded, getting killed. Whole families have been sitting underground for weeks, many others are refugees. People are being killed and wounded in their homes, thousands of homes have been destroyed. By an organization described by some foreign media as a ‘resistance movement’. Resistance against what exactly?
    Against Israel’s existence. They are quite clear about that.
    The situation is that Lebanon has to burn right now if Israel is to survive. I’m sorry for the people on the other side, but that is the way it is. Us or them. In that respect we are not doing nearly enough for the enemy to get the picture. No, for the enemy to cease to be.

You know, at some theoretical level, I know that when people say or do hateful things, they do so out of their own fear… and the best way to respond is to be compassionate toward the place in them where they experience that fear.
I think I can clearly see that Imshin was writing these really hateful things because she was deeply fearful, and I can understand where that fear comes from. (I’ve spent plenty of nights huddling in corridors and basements under the assault of incoming rockets and artillery… Actually, many more than she has, since she lives in Tel Aviv, not further north.) And maybe when you’re living right in such a coccoon of fear it is hard for you to think logically about all the consequences of your own words and actions?
But “Lebanon has to burn right now if Israel is to survive”? Where does that come from, Imshin? You are far too smart and sophisticated to think that that is any kind of a recipe for Israel’s longterm wellbeing.
… So now, I hope that with ceasefire along your country’s northern border you can finally climb out of your mental bunker and see things a little more clearly.
Imshin, if you are really concerned about Israel’s longterm wellbeing, as I certainly believe you are, then how come you can’t see that this depends on your country being able to build decent and fair relationships with all of your neighbors? You can’t just hope to “burn” them all while you yourselves remain living in self-righteousness and peace… Can you?

Value changes in Israel, too

Back in March, I wrote in this CSM column about some Israelis “sip[ping] lattes in lavish shopping malls as conflict with the Palestinians seems comfortably distant.” Some commenters here on JWN grew intriguingly apoplectic about that, which was an honest description of something I saw in several places, especially in greater Tel Aviv.
I think, though, that I was getting close there to remarking on something significant about the change in Israel’s values and self-image over the years. Long gone, apparently is the self-image Israelis used to like to project of being hardy, egalitarian “pioneers” committed to building a new and better society there. Instead, we have this report in today’s HaAretz, indicating just how far the erosion of that image has gone:

    Senior sources in the Israel Defense Forces General Staff and field officers who took part in the war in Lebanon said on Tuesday that Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, who went to his bank branch and sold an NIS 120,000 investment portfolio only three hours after two soldiers were abducted by Hezbollah on the northern border, cannot escape resignation.
    The sources say there is a clear ethical flaw in the chief of staff’s behavior during the hours when soldiers were killed in Lebanon and others were attempting to rescue wounded. Halutz should resign the moment the military completes its pullout from south Lebanon, they said.
    At this stage, it does not appear that Halutz intends to resign of his own accord.
    Several hours after the July 12 abduction, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared war on Hezbollah and Israeli warplanes began bombing targets deep inside Lebanon.
    But as the country’s political and military echelons met urgently to discuss the possible declaration of war, Halutz went at 12:00 P.M. to sell an investment portfolio, the Ma’ariv newspaper reported on Tuesday…

Personally, I don’t have anything against Israelis, individually or collectively, becoming rich and living a west-European-style lifestyle. I do, however, have considerable objections to my government giving the largest swathe of the “aid” dollars it gives to any country, to Israel– at a time when the GDP per capita there is already well over $20,000. And I do have an objection to Israelis continuing (many of them) to live off reparations that they received for properties that were seized from their families in the early 1940s in Europe, at a time when they still refuse to discuss giving any reparations, themselves, for properties seized from Palestinians in 1948 and indeed for all the considerable material damage Israel has visited on Palestinian and Lebanese civilians over the decades since then.
Anyway, if Israelis want to focus on getting rich, and spend their time sipping lattes in malls, that’s great. Just let them finish concluding their unfinished business with their neighbors, first. Like, they should get out of all (or darn’ nearly all) of the lands they occupied during the war of 1967 and have been exploiting and benefitting from heavily ever since… Like, they should settle up the many other claims still outstanding against them since 1948… Once they’ve done all that, sure, partying and making money on both sides of the present “Green Line” would be good.
(And meantime, they should know that the privations they are continuing to visit on their neighbors will ensure that these neighbors’ claims on Israel can never be simply wished away, however much many Israelis might want to do that.)
Actually, one could be pretty hopeful about the desire that many Israelis now have to live relatively luxurious, European- or US-style lifestyles. After all, in Portugal, back in 1970s, it was the desire of the new generation of army officers to be free of the constraints of conscription, and the constant waging of colonial wars that made that system necessary, that finally persuaded those officers to go home from their colonial outposts and lead the country’s peaceful, democratic, anti-Salazar revolution.., And as a collateral benefit of that desire the younger Portuguese had for a Carnaby Street lifestyle, the rapidly democratizing Portugal shucked off its vast colonial holdings like an uncomfortable old skin. Maybe the new generation of Israelis could be like that, too? Wouldn’t that be interesting?

High command problems in Israel

Aluf Benn and two colleagues writing in Wednesday’s HaAretz tell us that:

    Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is still debating whether to approve the proposed expansion of the Israel Defense Forces’ ground operation in south Lebanon. The proposal will be brought to the diplomatic-security cabinet Wednesday morning for approval.
    Olmert fears that the plan presented by the defense establishment will result in hundreds of casualties, and therefore, wants to subject it to a careful cost-benefit analysis. In Tuesday’s fighting in Lebanon, five soldiers were killed and 23 others wounded, two of them seriously.
    According to a government source, Olmert has also asked the army to present him with several different options for a ground operation…

This, on the same day that AP’s Steve Weizman tells us of a significant, mid-war change in the command structure at Israel’s Northern Command:

    The commander of the Israeli military on Tuesday appointed his deputy to oversee Israel’s battles in Lebanon, a dramatic mid-offensive shift sidelining the head of the northern command.
    The military announced the appointment of Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinksi in a statement on Tuesday. Israeli media linked it to plans to intensify the offensive in Lebanon as well as to mounting public criticism of the army’s handling of the conflict with Hezbollah guerrillas.
    Though the military denied it, the appointment looked like a shake-up of the top command on the Lebanon front in the midst of a campaign, a highly unusual move.
    Writing in the Haaretz daily, veteran military analyst Zeev Schiff said the new appointment signaled serious command problems.
    “Clearly, the change in the command leadership is not good for Adam personally,” he wrote, referring to the head of the northern command, Maj. Gen. Udi Adam. “But it also sends a negative signal to the army and the public at large.”
    The last time a similar switch was made was during the 1973 Mideast war, when generals in the army reserves, including former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, were sent to the southern command to effectively take over from the general in charge, Shmuel Gorodish, in the battle against Egypt.
    Israel has lost 36 civilians and 65 troops since the fighting with Hezbollah began on July 12. Despite the 28-day offensive, rockets continue to pummel northern Israel. According to the Israeli police, 145 rockets exploded in Israel on Tuesday alone.
    Criticism of the conduct of the war has concentrated on the slow progression from the air campaign to a ground offensive and the failure of the military to sweep through Lebanon in a matter of days, as it did in 1982.
    However, much of the criticism has been aimed at the political leadership — Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz — because the Security Cabinet they head has failed to approve the military’s plans to push forward more quickly.

Schiff’s whole piece is here.
Two quick comments. First, the facts of the military shake-up and the strategic uncertainty in the political echelon in Israel indicate to me that I was right to estimate, back in mid-July, that the early days of the Israeli assault on Lebanon were not part of some long-hatched plan against the country– but that in those days, as indeed since, Olmert and his equally untested Defense Minister Amir Peretz were deciding things on the run, in haste, and with great emotionality, rather than playing from a smoothly prepared strategic script. Weizman’s reference to the earlier comparable command shake-up, back in 1973, underscores this. That too was a war that was not one of choice– and comprehensive pre-preparation– by the Israeli high command… Unlike, say the wars of 1956 or 1982, which were chosen and extensively pre-planned by the high command long before they were launched.
A second related point: It is not necessarily good news for those of us hoping for a speedy ceasefire and a far-reaching, sustainable peace to learn of the edginess and indecision at the top of the Israeli command structure. If this whole assault up until now was driven mainly by Olmert’s emotional over-reaction to the capture of the two soldiers on July 12, then who knows what further risky decisions his cabinet might take over the weeks ahead?
(The more charitable explanation for Olmert’s actions has been that he was determined to “re-establish the credibility of Israel’s strategic deterrence”, which according to many Israeli strategic analysts on the right had been severely dented by the unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon back in 2000. But the effectiveness of a strategic deterrent depends crucially on the psychology of those being deterred. So long as Israeli troops are on Lebanese soil and Lebanon’s people remain targeted by Israeli stand-off weapons on a continuing basis, then the Hizbullahis are unlikely to be “deterred” from continuing their military activities… But anyway, as noted above, I believe Olmert’s decisions have been far more emotional and less rational than this… )

Historical and moral clarity from Prof. Ze’ev Ma’oz

I know that in blogosphere terms I’m wildly out-of-date to draw attention at this point to this article, published on July 25 by Prof. Ze’ev Maoz. But it is an important beacon of moral clarity in an Israel that seems largely to have become wrapped up in an aura of extreme self-righteousness that has clouded it (and much of the current US political leadership, too) from being able truly to see and care about the intrinsic worth of every single human person, including those who happen not to be Jewish or Israeli.
Maoz’s article is even more important because from 1994 through 1997 he was the head of Tel Aviv University ‘s very prestigious and professional “Jaffee Center for Security Studies”. He really is someone who knows whereof he writes concerning the nature of warfare.
Maoz writes:

    There’s practically a holy consensus right now that the war in the North is a just war and that morality is on our side. The bitter truth must be said: this holy consensus is based on short-range selective memory, an introverted worldview, and double standards.
    This war is not a just war. Israel is using excessive force without distinguishing between civilian population and enemy, whose sole purpose is extortion. That is not to say that morality and justice are on Hezbollah’s side. Most certainly not. But the fact that Hezbollah “started it” when it kidnapped soldiers from across an international border does not even begin to tilt the scales of justice toward our side.
    Let’s start with a few facts…

He then reviews the history of Israel’s (extremely harmful) military assaults on and in Lebanon since 1982. He continues:

    So much for the history of morality. Now, let’s consider current affairs. What exactly is the difference between launching Katyushas into civilian population centers in Israel and the Israel Air Force bombing population centers in south Beirut, Tyre, Sidon and Tripoli? The IDF has fired thousands of shells into south Lebanon villages, alleging that Hezbollah men are concealed among the civilian population. Approximately 25 Israeli civilians have been killed as a result of Katyusha missiles to date. The number of dead in Lebanon, the vast majority comprised of civilians who have nothing to do with Hezbollah, is more than 300.
    Worse yet, bombing infrastructure targets such as power stations, bridges and other civil facilities turns the entire Lebanese civilian population into a victim and hostage, even if we are not physically harming civilians. The use of bombings to achieve a diplomatic goal – namely, coercing the Lebanese government into implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1559 – is an attempt at political blackmail, and no less than the kidnapping of IDF soldiers by Hezbollah is the aim of bringing about a prisoner exchange…

(My thanks to friends Len and Libby Traubman, longtime workers for Israeli-Palestinian harmony and justice, who alerted me to this important article.)