Brig. Gen. Gal Hirsch (Alon Ron)
Let it not be said that the IDF doesn’t learn from its mistakes and draw the proper conclusions.* The new deputy commander of Israel’s “depth command,” designed to take the battle to the enemy far from Israeli territory, is Brig. Gen. Gal Hirsch (Hebrew). In 2006, he commanded the unit which was attacked by Hezbollah resulting in the capture and death of two IDF soldiers. This embarrassing debacle in turn led to the Lebanon War, an even more embarrassing debacle for Israel and the IDF.
The Almog Report (chaired by Doron Almog, another IDF commander embroiled in controversy), which examined IDF performance during the war, slammed him for his unit’s sloppy preparation and performance that betrayed weaknesses which enabled the Hezbollah attack. Most notoriously, Hirsch bragged to the Israeli media that the IDF controlled the village of Bint Jabel the day before nine Golani troops were killed there in a massive firefight. In this he wasn’t alone. The IDF bragged it’d killed Hassan Nasrallah using a U.S. bunker buster when it hadn’t. Dan Halutz also predicted his forces would bomb Lebanon back to the Stone Age. Though they tried awfully hard, they didn’t quite succeed at that either thanks in part to Iranian funds which helped rebuild the south.
Almog planned to recommend that Hirsch be deprived of any future IDF command, but he resigned just before the document was released. This enabled him to rear his ugly head again as he has today, like a cat of nine lives.
One wonders how someone who resigned in disgrace for something close to dereliction of duty could be allowed to return in a role with a supposedly prestigious new unit which shows that the IDF is adapting to new technology and the changing world. All this goes to confirm that the IDF is very good at recycling the same tired old faces which have failed in the past and much less successful at looking at objectives and strategy in new and unorthodox ways. It would rather remain with the tried, failed and true than experiment with the new and unconventional.
One also wonders how a commander who couldn’t prepare for or prevent his own troops from being attacked and killed by a relatively primitive fighting force like Hezbollah will succeed in combat against far more sophisticated enemies like Iran.
His Hebrew Wikipedia article reveals rather ironically that he chaired a group, Noam, which commemorated a fallen IDF soldier, Eytan Belhassan. No word on his chairing any similar committees in memory of Ehud Goldwasser or Eldad Regev. Imagine how the parents of these two men and all the other soldiers under his command feel about this atrocious rehabilitation of failed commander.
* the Hebrew (l’hasik maskanot) for “drawing the [proper] conclusion” means “resignation”
Silverstein has published Tikun Olam since 2003, It exposes the secrets of the Israeli national security state. He lives in Seattle, but his heart is in the east. He publishes regularly at Middle East Eye, the New Arab, and Jacobin Magazine. His work has also appeared in Al Jazeera English, The Nation, Truthout and other outlets.
It is so easy for us ‘armchair generals’ to criticize men who make command decisions under fire.
What command decisions did we make today?
‘Hmm….which necktie will go better with my blue sports jacket…Hmm?’
I also imagine that its easier to smear a military man from 2000 miles away with a keypad than it is to tell him that he’s derelict right to his face.
C’est le guerre.
If you read the links I offered you’d know that Hirsch came under the sharpest criticism not from me but from Doron Almog and one of Hirsch’s own sub commanders during the war. Their criticism was strenuous and public. I merely repeated it. I take it you’re not going to call them “arm chair generals,” now are you?
It’s the tone of your article. The tone.
I would say this one is “hilarious”.
Inorder to show the brigadier Hirsch in poor light, RS has not refrained from calling Hezbollah a primitive fighting force.
Primitive compared to the IDF. Yes of course. I’d say your sense of humor is wanting.
Sorry, office topic: Please everyone call, email, flood email and phone lines! Get info for what to do on this link.:
http://mondoweiss.net/2012/02/khader-adnan-54-days-of-hunger-strike-to-see-final-military-appeal-tomorrow.html
Netanyahu has been dying to plant military commanders that are in line with his demands to achieve regime change in Iran and the United States. 😉 Consequently, this will destroy Israel like a Project for a New American Century theory in practice, aka the Neocon agenda, that was executed like a boxing match between two men with no arms. Simply: they have grandiose schemes, short term interests, and neglect the details over the long-term because the details – the important ones – are, well, “collateral damage”.
This guy has an axe to grind. Would it be far fetched to think that if he might sign on to a vindication by taking on the mother of the resistance militia that kicked his ass out of Lebanon? It’s not like he didn’t drop cluster bombs in civilian areas on the way out or use depleted uranium and other lingering hazmats on women and children.. oh wait, he did. This man will commit pure evil and call it honor just to vindicate his ego. At his lead is a megalomaniac with a messiah complex and hundreds of rogue nuclear weapons that could eradicate humanity in a quick flash.
And someone (ANYONE) is trying to convince me that the Iranians who cannot even produce a reasonable domestic battery will now overtly notify the world of their intent to produce a nuke, spend a window of an entire year building said nuke, and sputter over a rocket to Israel while the world idly sits by and watches without having even so much as tested a nuke in the first place to see if things will work out. I’m sure they will photoshop the results. fml…
You got another mentioning in Israeli media –
http://www.haaretz.co.il/magazine/doron-rosenblum/1.1636896
(the 4th paragraph, in hebrew)
Did he mention me? No. It was a joke & a funny one.
To fill in for non-Hebrew speaking readers: Doron Rosenbloom wrote a piece of political satire in which he criticized lots of harmful attitudes of the Israeli military-intelligence community. He mentions an American blogger in a humorous way clearly referring to me in the most generic way possible.
In general, he was flaying precisely the same Israelis that I flay regarding an Iran attack.
You know, when I first read the title of the article, I thought it was something different. I had read that right before the war started, some Israeli commander had sold all of his stock on the Tel Aviv Exchange. I wonder what happended to him? I hope this is not the same guy?
That was the chief of staff, Dan Halutz.