The war of 2006: Report of the commission of inquiry

By Ari Shavit Haaretz Magazine Section 21 July 2006
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/740948.html

As will be recalled, the Barak Commission was established in September 2006,
immediately after the retirement of Aharon Barak as president of the Supreme
Court and immediately after the scale of the political-security blunder of
2006 became apparent. The commission's mandate was unlimited. The amount of
work the commission had to do was immense. As is known, Aharon Barak's
approach is that everything is investigatable. However, already at this
early stage the commission feels the need to present main preliminary
findings to the country's citizens. The members of the commission believe
that because the situation on the northern border has not yet stabilized
completely, the exposure of the conceptual and organizational flaws that
brought us to this state of affairs is essential.

At the outset, the commission wishes to praise the prime minister for the
sangfroid he displayed during the confrontation in the north, the Israel
Defense Forces for its ability to recover and achieve impressive results
toward the end of the fighting and the Israeli public, whose staying power
made it possible for Israel to cope with the challenge and vanquish the
enemy. However, the commission finds that the damage the 2006 war caused
Israel is deep and bears long-range, far-reaching implications.

The fact that Israel emerged as a country that a small terrorist
organization was capable of hitting significantly in conventional warfare is
drawing the next conventional war very close, and it is liable to be far
graver than the present one. The fact that Israel was revealed as a country
that has no genuine response to steep-trajectory weapons renders such
weapons a paramount strategic threat, which cast a dark shadow over the
country's future. The fact that some 2 million Israelis lived in dread
during the summer or were compelled to become voluntary refugees in their
own country, has cracked the self-image and the external image of Israel as
the safe haven of the Jewish people.

In the summer of 2006, before crushing Hezbollah, Israel was humiliated. In
the Middle East, the implication of humiliation is not just emotional but
strategic. When the ocean is seething with sharks, the dolphin must not
bleed or project weakness. In the past few months, the Hezbollah offensive
led to the Israeli dolphin bleeding and projecting weakness. The bleeding
and weakness will haunt us in the years ahead and tempt various sharks to
attack us again and again. Therefore, despite the successful conclusion of
the IDF operation in Lebanon, the commission has no choice but to state that
the events of the past summer were indeed a blunder.

Underlying the blunder of 1973 was the political conception of the status
quo. The baseless belief that Israel's power allowed it to ignore its
surroundings and shape its destiny as it wished. In contrast, underlying the
blunder of 2006 was the political conception of unilateralism. The baseless
belief that Israel's power enables it to ignore its surroundings and shape
its destiny as it wishes.

Seemingly, the blunder of 2006 was the opposite of the blunder of 1973,
because it stemmed from a blind belief in withdrawal and not from a blind
belief in occupation. In fact, though, the blunder of 2006 entailed an
arrogance similar to that of 1973. This time, too, an exaggerated sense of
strength led to the basic facts of the conflict being ignored. This time,
too, political blindness induced Israel to take hasty steps whose
implications were not weighed and whose consequences were not anticipated.

The data that were presented to the commission prove unequivocally that the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict contains a solid law of nature: Every Israeli
withdrawal brings in its wake an outbreak of violence. This was the case in
1994, in 1996 and again in 2000. Accordingly, it should have been clear from
the outset that the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza would bring in
its wake an outbreak of war. In fact, there was a vicious circle here that
was foreseeable: The unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon led to the Al-Aqsa
Intifada, which led to the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, which led to the
collapse of the arrangement that was forged in the wake of the unilateral
withdrawal from Lebanon.

The commission is not out to determine whether the disengagement was
justified or not. That is a moral and ideological matter. However, the
commission asserts unequivocally that whose who advocated the disengagement
and led it should have been aware that it would lead to the renewal of
hostilities on a broad scale. The fact that the country's leaders were not
aware of the unavoidable consequence of the unilateral move they initiated,
makes them the bearers of the overall responsibility for the blunder of the
political-policy conception of 2006.

The blunder of 1973 was also based on a mistaken military conception - the
supercilious evaluation that Israel's air superiority and its advantage in
the armored sphere accorded it the capability to crush any adversary and
eradicate any threat within a short time and without any real difficulty.
The blunder of 2006 was also based on a mistaken military conception - the
supercilious evaluation that Israel's air superiority and its advantage in
the sphere of precision weapons accord it the capability to crush any
adversary and eradicate any threat within a short time and without any real
difficulty.

In the Yom Kippur War, the failure stemmed from not understanding that the
SAM-2 and SAM-3 and Sagger missiles were striking at Israel's Achilles heel
and largely neutralizing the sources of its might. In the war of 2006, the
bewilderment stemmed from not understanding that the Katyushas, the Qassam
rockets, the Al-Fajr rockets and the Zelzal missiles were striking at
Israel's Achilles heel and bringing into being an alternative field of
battle that largely neutralized the scope of its might.

As in 1973, in 2006, too, the writing was on the wall. The potential threat
was known but not internalized. Thus, following the unilateral withdrawal
from Gaza it turned out that the defense establishment had not formulated a
security doctrine that would provide an answer to the challenge of the
Qassams. In contrast, the blue army developed a magical and dangerous belief
in the omnipotence of the Air Force and in the marvels of precision weapons.
As a result, a mistaken military strategy was created, based entirely on
fighting from the air.

The hope of achieving an elegant victory without human contact was a
spurious hope that frivolously ignored the experience accumulated in Kosovo,
Afghanistan and even in the Gulf War. In the commission's estimation, the
deterrent failure after the disengagement stems in part from the mistaken
military conception of 2006. This mistaken conception also involves the
force structure of the IDF, which must be changed immediately before another
and far more serious strategic surprise is inflicted on us.

In 1973, there was an intelligence blunder. It was the same in 2006. True,
intelligence had reported for years that Hezbollah possessed an offensive
deployment of some 12,000 rockets. Intelligence also warned that Hezbollah
was out to kidnap soldiers. However, intelligence did not expect a war in
2006. It did not warn the Israeli public about what was about to happen.
Intelligence did not assess correctly the danger embodied in Hezbollah. It
did not prepare the Navy for the missiles that were fired at its vessels. It
did not report to the residents of the center of the country that they, too,
were within range of Nasrallah's weapons.

But above and beyond all this, intelligence did not succeed in penetrating
Hezbollah to a point where the IDF could unleash its full strength against
the organization. The tremendous advantage of the Israeli army in the sphere
of firepower did not find expression against Hezbollah in the first stage of
the campaign, because intelligence did not provide the Air Force or the
precision artillery with a worthy number of precise and qualitative
Hezbollah targets. In the absence of such targets, the IDF was like a giant
trying vainly to squash a mosquito.

The upshot was that the political echelon found itself in a bind. It did not
have a political mandate to do what the IDF knew how to do - smash Lebanon
to smithereens - whereas it did have a mandate to do what the IDF did not
know how to do: to vanquish Hezbollah utterly. The multidimensional failure
of intelligence vis-a-vis Hezbollah must be added to its failures in regard
to Libya and Iraq, and necessitates a comprehensive overhaul of the Israeli
intelligence community.

The blunder of 1973 began in August 1970, when Israel, worn down by the War
of Attrition, showed restraint when Egypt moved up its antiaircraft missiles
toward the Suez Canal, contrary to the cease-fire terms. There is no doubt
that, similarly, the blunder of 2006 began long before the shooting started,
when Israel accepted, at the beginning of the new century, the growth of a
cancerous Nasrallah abscess on its northern border.

The blunder of putting up with the advancement of the Egyptian missiles in
the 1970s and the blunder of putting up with the creation of the Hezbollah
rocket deployment in the 21st century are remarkably similar. In both cases
the weariness of Israel society prompted its leaders to ignore a clear
danger because dealing with that danger would have entailed a major national
effort. However, in both cases, in the final analysis, the national effort
that was required to resolve the problem after it reached the critical stage
was far greater than it would have been if the problem had been dealt with
at the outset.

The lesson is clear: In the Middle East the ostrich method does not work.
Repression and denial have intolerable consequences. Therefore, the problem
of the steep-trajectory weapons in the Gaza Strip must be solved today and
not put off until the day after tomorrow. Therefore the problems entailed in
a withdrawal from the West Bank must be solved before the withdrawal and not
afterward.

Even after the Nasrallah era, the challenge he posed to us remains intact.
Without any doubt, Nasrallah was the great challenger of the Israeli spirit
in this period. He knew Israel well and accurately identified its weak
points. True, the sheikh was given to boasting and also made a mistake in
his calculations when he initiated the July offensive, but he is gifted with
a certain type of postmodern military genius that is capable of extracting
the maximum impact from limited resources. The disciplined guerrilla army,
hidden from the eye and using its own remote-control weapons, is the army of
the future. By means of that army, Nasrallah directed a battle film that
deserves to be studied. His thesis about Israel as a society of spider webs
must be addressed.

Seemingly, the events of the summer refute the spider-web thesis. As in
2002, the Israeli population demonstrated its resilience in 2006. The
Israeli fighters demonstrated sophistication and resourcefulness. Israel
emerged from the campaign with the upper hand. However, these achievements
cannot blur the fact that at certain moments and in certain spheres Israel's
weaknesses as a fighting democracy were revealed. The delay in launching the
ground move stemmed from the fear of putting the ground forces to the test.
The weeks in which Israel's citizens sat in shelters in order to protect the
lives of Israel's soldiers attested to a fundamental anomaly. Throughout the
Middle East, the impression was that the civil society in Israel is not
mentally or morally prepared to take difficult but necessary military steps.
The fact that in the end both the society and the army found in themselves
an inner strength as in Operation Defensive Shield came as a surprise to
Nasrallah and was his undoing. However, some of the question marks he raised
still remain.

The war of 2006 did not resemble the 1973 war in its intensity, its scale or
in the human losses it caused. It did not endanger Israel's existence and
did not inflict a disaster on the country. However, the 2006 war caused a
severe blow to the home front such as we have not known since 1973.

The war of 2006 left behind a series of additional precedents that are also
worrisome. Precisely because the war was not waged against a sovereign state
but against a sub-state organization, its implications could be serious.
Accordingly, this war has to be seen as a kind of giant warning sign.

In contrast to the Agranat Commission after the 1973 war, the Barak
Commission after the war of 2006 does not see fit to take any measures
against senior figures in the Israeli establishment. However, already at
this early stage, before the full report is submitted to the government, the
commission recommends that conclusions be drawn in the sphere of the
political and strategic conception, which will prevent the recurrence of the
pattern of unilateral withdrawal, will neutralize the threat of
steep-trajectory weapons and will restore Israel's deterrent capability.
Only thus will it be possible to ensure Israel's security and steadfastness
in the long term.