Monday, April 30, 2007
This week in Israel….. Behind the news with Gershon Baskin
A few hours the interim report of the Winograd Commission will be issued with the first conclusions regarding the failed performance of the Government and the army in last summer`s fiasco in Lebanon. All of the media in Israel and around the world will cover in detail the findings of the Commission. The interim report is supposed to deal only with the first days of the war and will probably find great fault with the behavior and actions of both the Government and the army. The main findings will likely be against the Prime Minister and the Defense Minister. The report will hopefully also deal with the failings of past Prime Ministers, Defense Ministers, chiefs of staff, and others.
In its findings on last summer and prior to last summer, the report will most likely not deal with the decisions that were not made by this and past governments that should have been made. For example, the Commission will most likely not question whether or not Israel should have gone to war at all this past summer. There is no doubt that Hezbollah provided Israel with suitable causus belli. The kidnapping and killing of the Israeli soldiers on Israel`s side of the border was a gross violation of Israel sovereignty. The shelling of the north prior to Israel`s military response was a continuation of the unprovoked violence. Israel was justified in responding militarily. But very quickly it became apparent that there were serious questions regarding the nature of the response and the proportionally of that response.
The decision to bombard the civilian population of Lebanon was more than foolish tactically, not even to mention wrong and immoral. Israel has continually hit civilian populations across its borders with the intent of influencing the public to pressure their governments. In this case, Israel misguidedly hoped that by bombarding the Lebanese civilian population, they would then turn their anger towards Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah. This, of course, is the exact opposite of what happened. Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of Arab political culture should have been able to predict this.
Those people who support the government and supported the war claim that Israel`s position is better off strategically than prior to the war. They claim that Hezbollah was hit hard, it lost its arsenal of longer range missiles, it has been moved back from the border and a more robust international force is in place. These are all achievements that were made following the war. The question is whether or not Israel`s situation is in fact strategically better now than it was prior to the war.
I want to assert that I believe that Israel had to respond to the violation of its sovereignty and to the killing and kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers. A limited military response hitting Hezbollah targets in the south would have sent the message where it needed to go. The main strategy of Israel should have been to liaise with the anti-Syrian coalition in Lebanon and those members of the international community that were supporting that coalition in order to change the strategic balance inside of Lebanon. That coalition had been successful in driving the Syrian army out of Lebanon. That same coalition had been working to convene the international tribunal to investigate and to prosecute the murderers of Rafiq al Hariri, who were most like senior Syrian officers, perhaps even leading directly to Bashar al Assad.
The anti-Syrian coalition in Lebanon was devastated following the war. The strength for Syria`s primary ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah, became stronger both amongst the masses in Lebanon – Christians, Druze, Sunnis and Shiites alike, as well as throughout the Arab and Muslim world. This is a great blow to Israel`s strategic position. Had Israel limited its military response and its targets, it would have been in a position to strengthen the anti-Syrian coalition and the government of Fouad Seniora in Lebanon and to thereby turn more anger towards Hezbollah`s denial of sovereignty from the elected Government of Lebanon.
Strengthening the government of Seniora, backed by Hariri the son and the Druze, most of the Christians and even part of the moderate Shiites, internal pressure could have been applied, supported by the international community, to deploy the Lebanese army in the south, to move Hezbollah north away from the border and to increase the effectiveness and the size of UNIFIL which could have been granted a wider mandate even without the war. Israel could have further strengthened that coalition, and the Seniora government, by entering into negotiations on the withdrawal from the Sheba` farms. Even if Israel had agreed to turn this area over to the UN and not to the Seniora government, that would have strengthened the Lebanese government and would have removed one of the only remaining pretexts of Hezbollah for being deployed in the south and for hitting Israel.
These strategic options were of course not presented to the Winograd Commission and the members of the Commission did not think of these themselves. This kind of thinking is simply foreign to Israeli decision makers. Why use diplomacy if one has the option of using force? That is the common Israeli wisdom.
The Winograd Commission will also not ask if the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon by Ehud Barak in 2000 could have been done differently. Was there really no way of reaching agreements on the withdrawal? I am guilty of supporting the withdrawal even without agreement, but I believed then, as I believe now that all efforts to reach agreements were not exhausted and all possible avenues for reaching agreements were not explored. It is true that those avenues also led to Damascus and the mess in Lebanon that we ran away from was also part of the failure of Israel and Syria to reach agreement on the Golan Heights. Barak got cold feet, left Clinton out in the cold with Assad, the father, at their famous Geneva summit and no Israeli-Syrian peace emerged that would have immediately led to Israeli-Lebanese peace.
Now we have a weakened government in Lebanon that will probably eventually fall with a significantly increased and empowered Hizbollah in its place. Syria and Iran have fully re-armed Hezbollah. Even Fouad Seniora says now that Lebanon will be the last Arab State to make peace with Israel. Israel has lost its all important strategic deterrence by performing so badly in the war. Perhaps the only real strategic improvement that Israel has gained is that everyone realized what a really bad state the Israeli army was in and perhaps, when and if it is really needed, god forbid, the army will be much better prepared to act.
So in conclusion, the main guilty party that should be condemned and exposed in the Winograd Commission`s report is Israel`s most basic faulty strategic and military doctrines. But this will not happen and Israel will not really learn the lesson of this past summer`s disaster.
Gershon Baskin is the Co-CEO of IPCRI, the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information.
