Israel's Broken Heart.
Final Reckoning
by Yossi Klein Halevi
TNR Online
Post date: 08.15.06
www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=w060814&s=halevi081506

However hard Ehud Olmert tries to spin it, the U.N. ceasefire that began
yesterday is a disaster for Israel and for the war on terrorism generally.
With an unprecedented green light from Washington to do whatever necessary
to uproot the Iranian front line against Israel, and with a level of
national unity and willingness to sacrifice unseen here since the 1973 Yom
Kippur War, our leaders squandered weeks restraining the army and fighting a
pretend war. Only in the two days before the ceasefire was the army finally
given the go-ahead to fight a real war.

But, by then, the U.N. resolution had codified the terms of Israel's defeat.
The resolution doesn't require the immediate return of our kidnapped
soldiers, but does urgently place the Shebaa Farms on the international
agenda--as if the Lebanese jihadists fired some 4,000 rockets at the Israeli
homefront over the fate of a bare mountain that the United Nations concluded
in 1967 belonged not to Lebanon but Syria. Worst of all, it once again
entrusts the security of Israel's northern border to the inept unifil. As
one outraged TV anchor put it, Israeli towns were exposed to the worst
attacks since the nation's founding, a million residents of the Galilee fled
or sat in shelters for a month, more than 150 Israeli civilians and soldiers
were killed along with nearly a thousand Lebanese--all in order to ensure
the return of U.N. peacekeepers to southern Lebanon.

This is a nation whose heart has been broken: by our failure to uproot the
jihadist threat, which will return for another and far more deadly round; by
the economic devastation of the Galilee and of a neighboring land we didn't
want to attack; by the heroism of our soldiers and the hesitations of our
politicians; by the young men buried and crippled in a war we prevented
ourselves from winning; by foreign journalists who can't tell the difference
between good and evil; by European leaders who equate an army that tries to
avoid civilian causalities with a terrorist group that revels in them; by a
United Nations that questions Israel's right to defend itself; and by
growing voices on the left who question Israel's right to exist at all.

At least some of the disasters of the past weeks were self-inflicted. We
forfeited the public relations battle that was, in part, Israel's to lose.
How is it possible that we failed to explain the justness of a war fought
against a genocidal enemy who attacked us across our U.N.-sanctioned
international border? It's hard to remember now, but we began this war with
the sympathy of a large part of the international community. Some Arab
leaders, for the first time in the history of the Middle East conflict,
actually blamed other Arabs for initiating hostilities with Israel. That
response came when Israel seemed determined to defeat Hezbollah; but, as the
weeks dragged on and Hezbollah appeared to be winning, moderate Arabs
adjusted accordingly. They didn't switch sides because we were fighting too
assertively but because we weren't fighting assertively enough.

Even before the shooting stopped, the reckoning here had already begun.
There are widespread expectations of dismissals for senior military
commanders who--when finally given the chance to end the Hezbollah threat
they had been warning about for almost 25 years--couldn't implement a
creative battle plan. But demands for accountability won't be confined to
the army alone. Journalist Ari Shavit, who has taken on something of the
role of Motti Ashkenazi--the reservist soldier who led the movement to bring
down the government of Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan after the Yom Kippur
War--wrote a front-page article in Haaretz calling for Olmert's resignation.
And that is only the opening shot. Even Maariv's Ben Caspit, one of Israel's
most pro-Olmert journalists, published an imaginary Olmert speech of apology
to the nation. A cartoon in Maariv showed Olmert as a boy playing with a
yo-yo inscribed with israel defense forces. None of Israel's wars was ever
fought with greater micromanagement by a government, and no government was
ever less qualified to manage a war as this one. Just as the post-Yom Kippur
War period destroyed military and political careers and eventually led to
the collapse of the Labor Party's hegemony, so will the post-Lebanon period
end careers and perhaps even the short-lived Kadima Party experiment.

A long list of reckonings awaits the Israeli public. There's the scandal of
the government's abandonment of tens of thousands of poor Israelis who
lacked the means to escape the north and were confined for weeks in public
shelters, their needs largely tended to by volunteers. There's the growing
bitterness between Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis, many of whom supported
Hezbollah in a war most Jews saw as an existential attack on the state. And
there's the emergency need to resurrect the military reserves, which have
been so neglected that a majority of men over 21 don't even serve anymore
and those that do tend to feel like suckers.

Still, in the Jewish calendar, the summer weeks after the fast of the Ninth
of Av, commemorating the destruction of the Temple, are a time of
consolation. "Be consoled, be consoled, my people," we read from the Torah
on the Sabbath after the fast. And so we console ourselves with the
substantial achievements of the people of Israel during this month of war.
First, our undiminished capacity for unity. My favorite symbol of that unity
is the antiwar rapper, Muki, whose hit song during the era of Palestinian
suicide bombings lamented the absence of justice for the Palestinians but
who, this time, insisted that the army needs to "finish the job" against
Hezbollah. Second, our middle-class children, with their cell phones, iPods,
and pizza deliveries to their army bases. In intimate combat, they
repeatedly bested Hezbollah fighters, even though the terrorists had the
advantage of familiar terrain. This generation has given us some of Israel's
most powerful images of heroism, like the soldier from a West Bank
settlement and father of two young children who leaped onto a grenade to
save his friends, shouting the Shema--the prayer of God's oneness--just
before the grenade exploded. Along with the recriminations, there will be
many medals of valor awarded in the coming weeks.

But the last month's fighting is only one battle in the jihadist war against
Israel's homefront that began with the second intifada in September 2000.
Israel won the first phase of that war, the four years of suicide bombings
that lasted until 2004. Now, in the second phase, we've lost the battle
against the rockets. But the qualities this heartbreak has revealed --unity
and sacrifice and faith in the justness of our cause--will ensure our
eventual victory in the next, inevitable, bitter round. Such is the nature
of consolation in Israel in the summer of 2006.
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Yossi Klein Halevi is a foreign correspondent for The New Republic and
senior fellow of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.