Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

As recently as 2000, Israel withdrew its forces from southern Lebanon after a disastrous occupation lasting 18 years. Not having learned its lesson well enough, it wishes to repeat the failure in 2006. The NY Times reports that Israel will reoccupy the same region until an international peacekeeping force takes control of the area:

Almost two weeks into its military assault on Hezbollah, Israel said Tuesday that it would occupy a strip inside southern Lebanon with ground troops until an international force could take its place.

The announcement raised the prospect of a more protracted Israeli involvement in Lebanon than the political and military leadership previously signaled or publicly sought. Officials have talked about limited raids into Lebanon, but now they seem ready to commit ground forces for at least weeks, if not months.

They said the zone would be much smaller than the strip of southern Lebanon roughly 15 miles deep that Israel occupied for nearly two decades before withdrawing in 2000…

Israel’s defense minister, Amir Peretz, said Israel’s plan for a buffer zone inside Lebanon was being worked out and did not provide details. “We will have to build a new security strip, a security strip that will be a cover for our forces until international forces arrive,” he said.

“We are shaping it, but you can’t draw a single line that will become a permanent line along the entire zone,” Mr. Peretz said on Israeli radio. “Unless there is a multinational force that will enter and take control, a multinational force with the ability to act, we will continue to fire against anyone who enters the designated strip.”

Israeli officials, mindful of the Israeli public’s reluctance to repeat its long occupation of southern Lebanon, say they do not plan a major ground invasion, and do not intend to hold large areas of territory for extended periods.

Does anyone remember how U.S. involvement in Vietnam kept increasing incrementally from a few hundred military “advisors” in 1963 to 500,000 troops and 55,000 dead by 1972-3? Does anyone remember the lies Ariel Sharon told Begin and the Israeli people in 1982 about his Lebanon adventure being a limited incursion lasting at most a few weeks and not advancing farther north than the Litani River? Does anyone remember Bush telling us the Iraq war would cost a mere fraction of what it has ended up costing us?

The point is (and I’ve been pounding away mercilessly at it here for weeks) that unless you execute a pinpoint military operation with clear and limited objectives you must perforce make the same mistakes Olmert, Peretz and the IDF are making here. Their biggest problem is that they are improvising the Lebanon war–essentially making it up as they go along. They have a “plan” in the same sense that the U.S. had a “plan” for administering Iraq after it “won” the war against Saddam. It represents mission creep, which is:

the expansion of a project or mission beyond its original goals, often after initial successes. Mission creep is usually considered undesirable due to the dangerous path of each success breeding more ambitious attempts, only stopping when a final, often catastrophic, failure occurs.

I’d rephrase that passage as it relates to Lebanon. Israel may believe it has had successes so far in its invasion. But I believe it is reoccupying Lebanon out of fear, rather than out of the exhilaration of military success. Israel knows it has roused a hornet’s nest in taking on Hezbollah. It also realizes that it has not, and cannot, extirpate the group from the region. It knows that if it withdrew from Lebanon the northern border would be a hot zone like you wouldn’t believe (especially compared to the relative quiet of the past six years). Therefore, it must (in its view) reoccupy or it will face the renewed ferocity of Hezbollah’s attack. The only problem with this reasoning is that this new protective zone will not protect either Israel or the IDF troops patrolling it. Expect the same devastating guerrilla attacks to resume which drove Israel out by 2000.

And let us not forget that Hezbollah (with Syrian backing) drove both the U.S. and France out of Lebanon in 1983 with massive terror attacks against their respective forces. So Hezbollah is expert at fighting invaders and driving them from its land. It is patient, it can afford to lose many in pursuit of its goals. I don’t believe that the Israeli people will have the same level of patience when the body bags start coming back home. Please make no mistake, I will not feel any positive emotion from this despite the fact that I will have been proven right. I will feel only sadness for lives lost which needn’t have been.

Israel is of course mindful of the analogies that are being made between 1982 and 2006. Its representatives keep repeating the mantra: “They’re not the same, they’re not the same,” as if wishing made it so:

A senior government official said Israeli forces intended to clear out Hezbollah strongholds in border villages as the military is already doing in Bint Jbail and Marun al Ras.

The military plans to move into other villages as well, but “this will not be the re-establishment of the old security zone,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. “It is not remotely similar.”

Of course it’s not. Just because he says so. And we believe him because…? But of course the invasions and occupations are so similar as to be virtually the same. And they will end virtually the same as I wrote above.

Though Israel has promised that its invasion will last only as long as it takes to constitute the new peacekeeping operation, that is now fraught with complications. The only European country which has expressed willingness to contribute troops, Germany, has wisely said it will only do so with the approval of Hezbollah. Why should Germany be so stupid as to try to do what Ronald Reagan tried and failed in 1983? Many observers feel that Hezbollah’s agreement to such a force is a dubious proposition. Why should Hezbollah agree unless it gets something in return like a return of Israel’s Lebanese prisoners and return of the Shebaa Farms? Besides, the U.S. is talking to neither Hezbollah or its patron Syria. Without such engagement I see little reason for either party to go along with the peacekeeping option.

And the Times says few other nations have stepped forward to participate in the mission:

The United States has ruled out its soldiers’ participating, NATO says it is overstretched, Britain feels its troops are overcommitted and Germany says it is willing to participate only if Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that it would police, agrees to it, a highly unlikely development.

“All the politicians are saying, ‘Great, great’ to the idea of a force, but no one is saying whose soldiers will be on the ground,” said one senior European official. “Everyone will volunteer to be in charge of the logistics in Cyprus.”

There has been strong verbal support for such a force in public, but also private concerns that soldiers would be seen as allied to Israel and would have to fight Hezbollah guerrillas who do not want foreigners, let alone the Lebanese Army, coming between them and the Israelis.

And this anonymous unbelievably obtuse comment from a State Department official in Condi Rice’s entourage about the supposed inevitability of the deployment of such a force:

I think you will hear about the impossibility of deploying an international force until the day it is deployed,” the official told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue. “But there will be an international force, because all the key players want it.”

I guess since we’re not talking to Hezbollah no one’s told this joker that Hezbollah’s attitude is: “not so fast.” Does he forget what happened in 1983 when we assumed all the ‘key players’ wanted us there??

As long as the international community cannot get its act together to create a viable force that is accepted by both warring parties Israel will be in southern Lebanon. To paraphrase Walter Mondale’s witty comeback against Ronald Reagan during a presidential debate: Israel won’t tell you it’s going to be occupying Lebanon for the indefinite future. I just did.”

I have to give credit where it’s due to Aron Trauring who presciently predicted today’s events in a post going back to July 18th:

Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and bombed it to smithereens. At the time there was no Hezbollah to rain down rockets on northern Israel. 18 years, thousands of dead people later, Israel left Lebanon, with its tail between its legs and Hezbollah, a well trained, well armed guerilla movement, left behind as a potent force in Lebanon.

So now, when Israel seems bent on repeating the mistakes of the past (and despite the disclaimers, it looks like Israel will invade Lebanon and recreate the failed “buffer zone”), even before the invasion there are large numbers of casualies on the Israeli side. Does any rational person truly believe Israel can defeat the Hezbollah militarily, when it failed to do so for 18 years? Jews think of themselves as being smart. But the mind-numbing display of blind stupidity displayed by the so-called “pro-Israel” camp, takes one’s breath away.

I have to admit I was skeptical at the time. I unfortunately gave the IDF and the Israeli government too much credit, believing they would recognize the quagmire they’d escaped from in 2000 and would be leery of falling into it again. Aron you were right and I was wrong. Lebanon redux IS a “mind-numbing display of blinding stupidity.”

There are so many things wrong with Israel’s current policy toward Lebanon and Hezbollah. It’s about as bad as it gets in terms of the miscalculation and foolhardy assumptions. But it can get worse and it just might if some Israeli ex-generals and the Likud hardline opposition have their way. Those generals fought and lost the last Lebanon war started by Ariel Sharon in 1982. In 2000, Ehud Barak unilaterally withdrew the IDF from southern Lebanon after the country’s misadventure there ended in abject failure. Now, they want to do it again. As Robert Rosenberg writes:

There is talk — but still only talk — of Israel launching a massive ground operation into Lebanon, to once and for all, as the proponents say, to clear south Lebanon of Hizbollah militiamen and their rockets. Those in favor of such an operation tend to be ex-infantry and armored corps generals from the days of the original Lebanon war, wanting to refight that lost war, or Rightist politicians like Likud MK Yisrael Katz, whose rise in Likud politics began when he served as an aide to then-defense minister Ariel Sharon.

On Army Radio today, Katz eerily echoed Menachem Begin, and apparently unwittingly so, when he said that Israel has to get over the ‘Lebanon trauma … and go into Lebanon in full force to get the job done.’ Begin, in his day, proudly explained that Operation Peace for Galilee, more popularly known as the Lebanon War, would ‘once and for all erase the trauma of the Yom Kippur war.’

Katz, now in the opposition and far from the reigns of power, tried to sweeten his vision of a corps of Israeli soldiers riding tanks and APCs into the quagmire of Lebanon, by saying, ‘they won’t be going into to stay there, just to do the job and get out.’ Shades of Begin and Sharon’s promise of an incursion that would only go as far as 40 kilometers, the range of the Katyushas that were in the hands of the PLO at the time.

Cabinet secretary Yisrael Maimon, pressed by Israel Radio’s Ayala Hason did admit today that there are plans for a massive incursion into Lebanon, but those plans are ‘not on the agenda.’ Instead, the current ground operations, he said, would suffice. Those operations are by elite commando units, target spotting for the aircraft overhead or ambushing Hizbollah cells still operating in south Lebanon — or much further north.

The NY Times today notes that Israel has greatly increased its ground operations in southern Lebanon over the past day or so. Two IDF soldiers were killed in a ground engagement yesterday and another two were killed today. These were the first ground force deaths since the war began:

Israeli officials suggested that Israeli ground troops may take a more active role in combating the Hezbollah militia and more strong condemnations were heard of Israel’s massive use of force in Lebanon.

So why would Israel fall into a trap it has already snared itself in to its great cost? First, you must understand the paucity of strategic vision that Olmert and Peretz possess. While I’m no military strategist, even I understand that when you use force you must have clear and limited objectives. You must have benchmarks to tell you when you’ve achieved them. And once you do you must stop and turn to political negotiation to achieve the remainder of your goals. What Israel has done both in its Gaza and Lebanon invasions is to weigh down the operations with many overlapping and sometimes conflicting objectives. Free the prisoners. Destroy Hamas and Hezbollah. Force the “moderate forces” in Lebanon and Palestine to “take control” of the situation. Strike blows against so-called proxies like Iran and Syria. With so many objectives you practically guarantee you will realize none.

There is also an improvised, catch as catch can element to both operations as if the commanders are making it up on the fly. If Hezbollah does one thing, we respond with another. If we see an opportunity to engage Hezbollah ground forces we take it even though a ground engagement may not be part of our operational mission.

Second, Olmert fronting a relatively weak government coalition is always looking over his shoulder at his political right (his original home). And Netanyahu and the other rabble-rousing extremists smell blood in the water and are in a feeding frenzy for the head of Nasrallah. As Robert said above, they and the former generals are itching to refight the last war they lost. Since the nation mistakenly perceives itself “winning” the Lebanon war the siren call of “finishing them off” beckons ever so seductively. And the best way to do this supposedly would be through a ground assault.

The concept of a ground assault is a fatal vision for Israel. It would be oh so easy to get sucked into a protracted ground war and ongoing occupation of southern Lebanon. Israel is not like Hezbollah or Hamas. It does not have endless stocks of recruits to expend in the process of pursuing its military objectives. A guerrilla insurgency is the worst type of war for Israel to fight as we are seeing ourselves in Iraq because it slowly bleeds your side dry with each new death or wounded victim.

Aron Trauring believes Israel will invade with ground troops. I doubted him. But now I’m not so sure. One thing we both agree on is that such an operation would only compound the blunder of Israel’s initial strategy of invading Lebanon and turning much of it to cinders. I pray that there are enough cooler heads in the IDF officer corps and military intelligence to persuade Halutz, Peretz and Olmert that this is not in Israel’s best interest. But somehow I doubt there are.

Over the past few days, I’ve had a dialogue of the deaf with Lisa Goldman, a Canadian-Israeli journalist who edits the Israel section of the Global Voices website. I’ve criticized the lack of diversity in Goldman’s choices of blogs she covers in her regular roundups of Israeli blogs. I’ve also criticized her narrow definition of what her section accepts. For example, this blog is not eligible because I am not Israeli, even though I blog about Israel every day.

Robert Rosenberg, who IS an Israeli and the author of Ariga.com a blog cum daily briefing on Israeli politics, informs me that his site is not considered eligible by Ms. Goldman because it is not a blog (or so she claims). [Correction: Though Goldman does not include Ariga in her roundup, Robert corrects my misinterpretation of something he wrote in a e-mail. She has never explictily explained to him why he is not included. I stand corrected.] The only thing Ariga.com lacks that other blogs have is a comment feature (and there are many blogs which turn off their comment feature, yet they’re still considered blogs). Interestingly, Goldman includes in her coverage Karen Alkalay-Gut’s website that calls itself a “diary” but is clearly not a conventional blog. The reason I raise Ariga as an example of Goldman’s narrow-mindedness is that Robert’s views of the Israeli-Arab conflict are similarly progressive to my own.

A search of Goldman’s roundups at the site turns up no mention of Aron Trauring’s Israel Peace Blog, another progressive voice among the Israeli blogging community. Ran Hacohen’s Letter from Israel at Antiwar.com also apparently doesn’t rate as a blog and so is deemed ineligible by Goldman.

I’ve already mentioned in my last post about Global Voices that there are no current Israeli-Arab bloggers featured there (though Goldman had recruited one who stopped writing). This means that Global Voices is not hearing from 20% of the Israeli population.

So who is she covering? In her current roundup she features Dutchblog Israel criticizing the British academic boycott of Israel. She calls him a “leftist” even though his position in the post in question can’t remotely be called leftist. I get the distinct impression that Goldman was pleased to feature a “leftist” who attacked the academic boycott. Next, she featured Olegirl who is “utterly disgusted” by the boycott. Hmm, do we start to see an ideological pattern here?

She also features a post from Treppenwitz about the story of a Palestinian girl suffering from cancer who was treated at an Israeli hospital. It seems the Palestinian minister of health refused to contribute toward the operation because Hamas does not wish to cooperate with such Israeli endeavors. The clear political motivation of the blog post was to stick it to Hamas and the (anti-Israel) world media for allegedly not covering the story:

Yet to these people [journalists] who drool over even the smallest news story the way a starving man drools over a steak, the willingness of the Palestinian Minister of Health… a Medical Doctor for whom politics should come second (if at all)… to let a little Palestinian girl die rather than cooperate with the Israelis, isn’t considered newsworthy.

And secondarily, he seeks to show how magnanimous Israel was to provide the medical treatment to begin with.

Goldman cites Sharvul for a non-political post and calls him “politically leftist.” After searching through his blog I could find hardly any material with overt political content except one post which criticized Israeli peace activists demonstrating outside chief of staff Dan Halutz’s home for calling him a “murderer.” Even if one agrees with his sentiment I’d hardly call it “politically leftist.”

To her credit, Goldman does feature one blog, which she again cites as “leftist” (what is it with the phrase that she uses it so much?), whose owner recounts her personal journey from a Land of Israel supporter to a human rights activist on behalf of the Palestinians. She also features a blog post by Karen Alkalay-Gut about a popular Israeli-Arab writer, one by a gay non-Israeli living in Israel about Gay Pride Day and one by a Lebanese tourist visiting Israel. I’m glad she included these posts (though only the first deals with the Israeli-Palestinian issue I’m raising here).

I have not yet heard from Global Voices editorial management about whether they see a need to expand the political voices in their Israel section. Goldman certainly doesn’t see a need as she dismissively ended our conversation about this saying she was merely writing to explain her position but not to listen to mine. She’s already spent too much time dealing with me as it was, etc.,etc. That’s why I call it a dialogue of the deaf. So unless and until anything changes at Global Voices, you’ll largely be hearing there but a single side of that critical conflict that hovers over Israel and Palestine (and the world) like a 900 lb. elephant. ‘Tis a pity.

I also want to make clear that while I am critical of the way Lisa Goldman is editing her section, I admire Global Voices’ mission overall and wish it only the best. My comments are meant to challenge the site to do better and are not meant at all destructively.