When Ehud Olmert formed his cabinet, a bare few months ago, there was no hint that within the first hundred days of its existence this government would plunge the country into the destructive convulsion of war.
In the March elections, Ehud Olmert had asked — and at least seemingly, got — a clear popular mandate for the carrying out of "Convergence" or "Realignment", i.e. a unilateral withdrawal from large parts of the West Bank and evacuating some 80,000 Israeli settlers from these areas, while retaining and perpetuating Israeli rule over the so-called "settlement blocks."
The Kadima Party which Ariel Sharon had created while breaking asunder the Likud, and which Olmert inherited with Sharon's stroke, had no other visible agenda or raison d'être — nor did the cabinet that he formed.
Olmert clearly did not share the Social Justice agenda that had been the elections plank of his main partner, Labour Party leader Amir Peretz. He adamantly refused to entrust Peretz with the Finance Ministry, the only ministerial post where the former trade union leader could have made a serious effort "to redefine Israel's socio-economic priorities."
When Peretz acquiesced in Olmert's veto and agreed to take up instead the Defence Ministry, as being "the only ministry of equal weight", it was widely regarded as a tacit agreement to put social reform on the back burner.
With the inauguration of Olmert's "Convergence Cabinet", settlers on the West Bank were preparing to wage a grim last-ditch struggle against the planned widespread dismantling of settlements. Some settler factions started open threats of violent civil disobedience which "would go much further" than the failed settler efforts to block Sharon's "Disengagement from Gaza" a year ago.
For their part, peace activists were bracing for a difficult dilemma: to support the Olmert plan because it promised to remove many of the settlements — or to oppose it because it would annex many others, and was to be unilaterally imposed on the Palestinians.
Though having some misgivings about Peretz taking up responsibility for Israel's machinery of armed might and oppression, some voices in the peace camp were hopeful that such an outspoken dove as Peretz would use this powerful position to push Olmert away from unilateralism and towards a negotiated solution.
In all these debates and calculations, few gave much thought to the Lebanese border, which had been quiet — bar minor incidents — for the past six years. True, from time to time the papers published the remarks of generals — sometimes a direct quotation, more often an anonymous "senior source inside the armed forces" — stating that the stockpiling of Katyusha rockets by Hizbullah was "unacceptable" and that "sooner or later, something will have to be done about it." But such statements were not given much attention.
Until July 2006, it was taken for granted that no Israeli government would send the troops back into the notorious "Lebanese swamp" where they had wallowed for eighteen years of futile, hellish guerrilla war — for much the same reasons that no US President is likely to order a new large-scale invasion of Vietnam.
Olmert had a very clearly formulated "Road Map" of his own for implementation of his unilateral plan, bearing not the slightest relation to the mothballed Middle East Road Map of international diplomacy (to which the PM paid the most bare minimum of lip service).
The details were set out in several official interviews and unofficial "leaks from senior sources" granted to various influential journalists. Olmert was to set out on an international tour to canvass diplomatic support for "Convergence": First, naturally, in Washington; then at important European capitals such as London and Paris; and then would come Cairo and Amman, housing pro-American Arab regimes which signed peace treaties with Israel.
Altogether, Olmert hoped to garner massive international and Arab backing to his plan. Only then would he offer it to the Palestinians themselves, on the basis of "take it or leave it."
He did not truly expect them to take it. As Olmert envisioned, there would be some months of pro-forma talks, which he assumed would prove futile and peter out, leaving Israel to "take its fate in its own hands" (an expression repeated in various of the PM's speeches and interviews) and define its own borders, more or less according to the line of the "Separation Fence" which is being energetically built and cutting up the West Bank.
In fact, Olmert placed far greater importance on "negotiations to achieve consensus within the Israeli society" which essentially meant negotiating with the settler leadership and asking it to at least tacitly accept the loss of smaller settlements in order to safeguard the position of bigger ones.
The PM seemed confident of his ability to eventually convince the more pragmatic settlers that trying to keep the whole of the West Bank would lead to the Palestinians, with their higher birth rate, becoming the majority and asking for the vote in Israel — which would spell the end of the entire Zionist project.
Soon, Olmert embarked on the planned tour, with somewhat mixed results. Commentators and ministerial aides constantly debated on whether or not President Bush defining Olmert's plan as "bold" amounted to a complete endorsement.
Later on, at successive joint press conferences with Prime Minister Blair, Presidents Chirac and Mubarak and King Abdullah, Olmert repeatedly made use of the same gambit: declaring that "negotiations are the best option" but that if they fail "there should be some fall-back option." Whatever reluctant assent his host provided was interpreted as an endorsement of unilateralism.
The only one who would have none of it was the King of Jordan. Already long ago the Hashemite Dynasty made abundantly clear that — due to the great number of Palestinians among Jordan's own population and their multiple family and social contacts with West Bank inhabitants — it would regard any precipitate Israeli step as a direct threat to the stability of its own regime.
In particular, the direct link between Olmert's Convergence and the Separation Fence — inflicting a massive dispossession and disruption of daily life on the West Bank Palestinians — made the Jordanians highly suspicious.
So, the Jordanian monarch pointedly did not give any endorsement — explicit or implicit — to the Convergence Plan of his Israeli guest; instead, Olmert was strongly prevailed upon to meet at last with Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen).
Olmert reluctantly agreed to hold such a meeting, on Jordanian soil — but he signally failed to provide Abu Mazen with even the slightest of achievements. Worse than that: Olmert did not even bother to curb his generals, who launched a devastating aerial attack on "terrorist targets" in Gaza City on the very eve of the scheduled meeting, leaving several civilians dead. This naturally caused Abu Mazen to come under strong criticism among Palestinians for having gone ahead with shaking Olmert's hand in front of clicking TV cameras.
"The importance of the meeting was in the very fact that it took place" stated prime ministerial aides after the meeting, and mentioned "the need to hold a further, better prepared meeting" at a date "within a few weeks." But before that further meeting could take place, rapid escalation reached the stage of all-out war.
The victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections seemed to play into the hands of Olmert and his unilateralists, giving a kind of wide international endorsement to the assertion that "there is no partner." Palestinian Prime Minister Haniya and his cabinet were dismissed as "terrorists bent upon Israel's destruction" and President Abu Mazen — as "well-meaning but powerless."
As it turned out, however, the brutal boycott of the Palestinians which Olmert actively promoted had the effect of inflaming the situation and setting in motion a rapid escalation which ultimately derailed Olmert's carefully worked out schedule, swept aside his entire Convergence Plan, and cast grave doubts on his very political survival.
What made the international boycott on the Palestinians devastatingly effective was the full participation of the Europeans, dating back to the very moment when the Haniya Government was inaugurated.
When agreeing to make economic aid to the Palestinians dependant upon the new cabinet accepting the famous "Three Conditions" — recognition of Israel, acceptance of former agreements and renunciation of violence — European leaders may have had in mind some process of official and unofficial negotiations whereby some compromise formulation would be established.
Haniya, his ministers and other senior Hamas ministers were quite open to such ideas — as they made abundantly clear through various feelers: Discreet messages were passed through whichever diplomats were willing to talk to them, in numerous interviews to the international press and some in the Israeli media as well, and also through the beginnings of direct dialogue between Hamas and the Israeli peace movement.
On May 13, Uri Avnery of the Gush Shalom movement arrived at A-Ram, a large Palestinian suburb of Jerusalem, to take part in a procession protesting the erection of the "Separation Wall" which bisects and effectively strangulates the town.
Within half an hour of his arrival Avnery had to take refuge in a nearby Palestinian home, with heavy clouds of tear gas shot by Israeli troops choking the street outside — in company with Sheikh Muhammad Abu-Tir, a prominent member of the Palestinian Legislative Council who also took part in the A-Ram protest.
The two had little to do until the gas subsided but talk to each other; subsequently, Avnery was invited to Abu-Tir's home in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Tzur Bahr, and a second meeting in the same venue included eight members of the Gush Shalom board, who held a several hours' discussion with Sheikh Abu-Tir and his fellow parliamentarian Ahmed Atun.
The message emanating from these meetings — as from numerous other sources — was clear: Contrary to the Olmert Government's assertions, the Hamas movement and the cabinet it had formed were not "committed to the destruction of Israel." Rather, they wanted the end of the Occupation, in exchange for that — but not for less than that — they were willing to make some kind of deal such as "a sixty-year long cease-fire with Israel."
The Olmert Government was not interested, nor were the editors and commentators in the mainstream Israeli media. The information presented by Gush Shalom — as by numerous other would-be mediators and people of good will of various nationalities — was greeted with derision and labeled "transparent terrorist propaganda"; Abu-Tir and Atun soon found themselves in an Israeli prison camp, in the company of many other Palestinian lawmakers and ministers.
True, Israeli Government speakers could gleefully point to radical statements emanating from the more militant wing of Hamas — which, being located at Damascus, was absolved of direct responsibility for the population of the Occupied Territories and specifically of the need to pay monthly salaries to Palestinian government workers.
These, Olmert and his Foreign Minister Tzippy Livni declared without the slightest hesitation or doubt, were the only true and authentic voice of Hamas, the only one that needed to be taken seriously and which proved conclusively the organization's nefarious and satanic designs.
Fortified by the full backing of Bush, who unhesitatingly placed Hamas among the Bad Guys of the Terrorist Axis of Evil, and of the Europeans who should have known better, Olmert steadily tightened the screws on the Palestinians. They were subjected to more severe economic sanctions than Apartheid South Africa ever endured. No less than denial of salaries to all public sector workers, who constitute more than a third of the Palestinian work force — after the possibility of working in Israel, the other main economic mainstay for Palestinians, was already cut off almost completely.
The worst hit was the Gaza Strip, always the most impoverished and overcrowded part of the Palestinian Territories. Following Sharon's Disengagement from Gaza last year, some rosy predictions were made of Gaza's possibilities of economic recovery and flourishing — but as all experts made clear, any such prospects were completely dependant on a free flow of goods into and out of the Strip.
Until the Palestinian elections, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice made some effort to nudge the recalcitrant Israeli authorities to open up their stranglehold over the Gaza border crossings. But this ceased as soon as news of the Palestinian elections results arrived in Washington.
With the tacit assent of Washington, the Karni Checkpoint — Gaza's main artery — was kept closed for months on end. Agricultural products from the hothouses left behind by Israeli settlers rotted on the Palestinian side, never reaching the European market where they might have fetched good prices — and whatever industry Gaza possesses stood idle for lack of the raw materials which piled up on the Israeli side.
Amir Peretz — in his first weeks as Defence Minister still trying to implement somewhat of a dovish policy — instructed the military authorities to speedily open Karni. A week later, he discovered that his order was carried out only very partly - to be precise, the checkpoint was opened for three and a half hours and then closed again "due to a severe alert of a planned terrorist assault."
Everybody concerned — the Israeli side as well as the Palestinians — agreed that there was some connection between the economic pressure on Gaza and the increasing of the cross-border exchanges of fire. Homemade, inaccurate Palestinian Qassam rockets were shot by militias at Israeli communities; batteries of heavy Israeli artillery answered with about a hundred times the Qassam's firepower.
According to Palestinians, the shooting of Qassams was an expression of Palestinian desperation at being literally strangulated; Israeli officials claimed that the closing of the checkpoints was "unavoidable due to increasing Palestinian aggression."
A factor that certainly increased the flames was the fact of Amir Peretz residing in Sderot, the Israeli town closest to the Gaza Strip border and targeted by the Qassams already for years.
Palestinian militias felt that they now had a significant military target within reach — namely, the private residence of Israel's Defence Minister — and redoubled their attacks on the town of Sderot.
For their part, inhabitants of Sderot — including key political supporters — started pressuring their fellow-townsman Peretz to "do something real against the Qassam." Some started a hunger strike in front of Peretz's home, and they were joined by right-wingers eager to prove that "Withdrawal from Gaza was a mistake, as we had said all along."
With the demonstrators crying out that "bombarding empty fields in North Gaza is a joke", and senior military officers saying more or less the same, Peretz finally authorized the artillery batteries to shoot far closer to Palestinian dwellings than they used to — with the inevitable result that more and more Palestinian civilians were getting killed. As reported by the weekend papers, Peretz agonized over each of these cases — which might even have been true, but the killings continued.
The killing of an entire Palestinian family on a picnic at the seashore of Gaza was not the first case of its kind — but it was the first in which photographers with video camera arrived on the scene quickly enough to capture the dramatic footage of a terribly distraught girl near the body of her dead father, which were then broadcast worldwide, and especially on the Palestinian TV itself.
(After a few days, the army started claiming that the Israeli artillery shells were not to blame, and that the family "was probably killed from a mine placed by the Palestinians themselves" — but had to admit that a second killing of civilians, three days later, was indeed "the result of a regrettable miscalculation by an Air Force pilot").
What Palestinians termed "The Beach Massacre" finally caused the Hamas leadership — hitherto stubbornly clinging to the Tahadiya (Ceasefire) it had declared in early 2005 — to join the Qassam firings, earlier conducted only by smaller, marginal militias. A retaliatory "rain of 40 Qassams" fell on Sderot (without hurting anybody) and Hamas officially took responsibility for it.
Government speakers gleefully pounced on this "proof positive of Hamas' terrorist nature", and generals spoke of "plans for a ground invasion in Gaza" being "ready for a forthcoming implementation."
With all this, the Palestinian society was also faced with an imminent danger of a civil war.
Aside from other effects, the Hamas elections victory engendered a lasting bitterness and antagonism between the elections victors and the Fatah Party, which had led the Palestinian National Movement for close to half a century and had controlled the Palestinian Authority since its inception.
When Hamas offered the creation of a National Unity Government, Fatah leaders had refused out of hand — preferring to let Hamas "face the music alone" and hoping for the interlopers' failure. And almost immediately upon learning the results of the "experiment in Palestinian democracy" which they had encouraged, the Americans had been pressing President Abu Mazen to dissolve the Hamas cabinet by one pretext or another.
Feeling (and not without reason) that the Palestinian security forces owed loyalty to the previous government more than to the current one, the Hamas cabinet started forming its own loyalist armed forces (or rather, give official status to the already-existent Hamas militia).
Rival militias and armed forces deployed in the streets of Palestinian cities, amid accusations and recriminations on both sides. This situation was observed with considerable concern by Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli prison camps.
The highly popular imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti approached fellow prisoners of similar standing from the other Palestinian factions — including Hamas and even the smaller and far more militant Islamic Jihad — to draft together a document which could serve as a basis for national reconciliation among Palestinians — and possibly also for breaking the international boycott on them.
The "Prisoners' Document" — which immediately became the subject of intensive discussion among Palestinians and not only among them — called for creating a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders (thus implicitly recognizing Israel) and for limiting the Palestinian armed struggle to the Occupied Territories (in effect opposing the shooting of missiles or sending of suicide bombers into Israeli territory).
Opinion polls among Palestinians showed a solid majority — composed of the supporters of virtually all parties and factions — supporting the Prisoners' Document.
In Israel, various doves and peace groups welcomed it — though predictably the Olmert Government angrily rejected it out of hand, reiterating its demand for 'The Three Conditions And Nothing But The Three Conditions.'
The document's standing changed when Abu Mazen — alarmed at the situation where the Palestinians' fortunes seemed to have reached their nadir while Olmert was received with a standing ovation at the halls of Congress in Washington — felt the need to take a bold new initiative: he declared that he would put the Prisoners' Document before the general Palestinian public in a referendum, scheduled for the end of July.
The declaration of the referendum raised the inter-Palestinian tensions to the highest pitch yet, with Hamas literally up in arms against what they considered an attempt to undermine and destabilize their cabinet and "nullify the elections result." Clashes between armed supporters of the two parties — often with lethal results — became a daily occurrence — interspersed with Israeli attacks leaving their own deadly toll.
Many of the reports published in the Israeli media were full of glee at "the Palestinians killing each other", and Palestinian support for the Prisoners' Document went down as with the referendum controversy it came to be perceived as "divisive rather than uniting."
For the Palestinian President, however, the referendum was a ploy to accelerate negotiations rather than an end in itself. There ensued intensive and often confused three-way negotiations between President Abu Mazen, the Gaza-based Prime Minister Haniya (who was reasonably amendable) and Khaled Mash'al — the Damascus-based Hamas leader who proved to be a more difficult obstacle.
Finally, Abu Mazen and Haniya reached an agreement whereby Abu Mazen cancelled his referendum in return for Hamas agreeing in principle to form a Unity Government on the basis of the Prisoners' Document.
But by the time they achieved this, their agreement seemed moot and irrelevant. A bold attack on an Israeli army position, with two soldiers killed and one captured and hauled off to a hiding place inside the Gaza Strip, has thrown a major monkey wrench into all the political and diplomatic alignments and calculations
On virtually every night since Israel reconquered the West Bank cities in April 2002, army units have been conducting raids aimed at capturing "wanted terrorists."
Every morning the Israeli radio news broadcast the statistics of the previous night's raids — the number of "suspected terrorists" captured (usually between ten and twenty) and the cities and villages where they were captured. Altogether, between 9,000 and 10,000 are nowadays behind Israeli bars.
Such raids are never a big news item — not even when some of the Palestinians get killed while "resisting arrest" or "trying to escape" (which happens every week or two). The term in Israeli reports used on such occasions is always "arrest", implying that Israel has a legitimate police power and that the people involved are criminals. Palestinian reports of the same events usually use the term "kidnap", but most Israelis neither know nor care about Palestinian opinion in the matter.
The raid near Rafah, where two Palestinian brothers were taken out of their beds by invading Israeli commandos and hauled off to detention in Israel, got a bit more attention because it was the first time that such methods were used in the Gaza Strip since the completion of Sharon's Disengagement. Even so, it was taken as very unsensational news, and no international diplomat is known to have commented on it.
It was quite different three days later. On an early morning hour, a Hamas squad penetrated half a kilometre into Israeli territory by a carefully dug tunnel bypassing the fortified border defences. They took an Israeli unit by complete surprise, destroyed a tank, killed two soldiers and carried off a third one as a captive.
This raid became worldwide news within minutes, and Gil'ad Shalit — hitherto an anonymous conscript like any other — became a household name. And here it was the Israeli side which very emphatically used the word "kidnapping", echoed by various diplomats who demanded an "unconditional release of the hostage."
Nobody on the Palestinian side presumed to claim that he was "arrested." It was, however, widely asserted that he was a Prisoner of War — a reasonable assertion considering that he was captured in course of what Israeli generals grudgingly admitted was "a professionally planned and executed military operation."
The operation and Shalit's capture were evidently a complete surprise — and not a pleasant one — to both to Palestinian President Abu Mazen and to Prime Minister Haniya. If to anybody, the attackers seemed accountable to the radical Hamas faction in Damascus. Apparently, neither Abu Mazen nor Haniya knew where he was held — and even had they known, there was no way for either one of them to comply with the Israeli and international demand for an "immediate and unconditional" release.
The soldier's capture had aroused wild hopes among the family members of the Palestinian prisoners, who went out on the streets in their thousands, holding photos of their imprisoned loved ones. Even to not particularly radical Palestinians, the international preoccupation with a single Israeli prisoner, compared with the indifference to thousands of Palestinian ones, seemed the most gross of double standards.
For his part, Olmert took a highly intransigent position, repeatedly declaring that he was going to "change the rules in the Middle East." True, in previous cases of captured Israelis, the government of the day had released hundreds (sometimes thousands) of Palestinian and other Arab prisoners — but he, Olmert, was not going to emulate them.
As commentators noted, exactly because his cabinet was conceived as being "dovish", and because he and his Defence Minister were both "civilians with no military experience", Olmert felt constrained to be far more inflexible than Sharon, for example, might have been in his place.
Noam Shalit, the captured soldier's father, who gained an enormous moral standing overnight, was daily interviewed by Israeli and international media that virtually besieged the Shalit Family home in a small Galilee community. In his modest but impressive way he called upon the government to accept the principle of prisoner exchange and "save my son before it is too late" — to no avail.
Israeli Military Intelligence was unable to locate the secret hiding place where the captured soldier was being held — very luckily for Shalit, since most previous attempts to release by force such Israeli prisoners ended with the prisoner's death. But there was left to Olmert and Peretz the option of using brutal and unrestrained force on the whole of the Gaza Strip — and this they proceeded to do.
First, the air force was sent to bomb the Gaza Strip's electric transformers, plunging the poor and overcrowded area into literal darkness. (Surviving auxiliary stations allowed Gazans no more than about six hours of electricity per day.)
In fact, since Gaza draws most of its electricity from Israel, there was no real need to destroy the transformers, causing damage estimated in the tens of millions of dollars, whose repair would take at least half a year. Simply closing a single switch on an Israeli switchboard would have sufficed — except that then the Palestinians could have sued the Israeli Electricity Company for breach of contract (and probably won) while destroying the transformers came under the legal heading of an Act of War.
Next, the army embarked on a night-time West Bank sweep of a special kind — targeting the Hamas movement's parliamentarians and cabinet ministers, and netting more than half of them. For some who evaded capture the hunt went on for the next month — such as Aziz Dweik, Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, whose capture was announced to the Israeli press in a proud joint communiqué of the army and the security service.
While the Palestinian Authority had long since stopped exercising much of a real authority on the ground, the blatant mass arrest of its top political echelon had stripped off the last remaining pretence of its being a sovereign authority.
In Gaza, the rump Palestinian cabinet continued to meet — though often in secret locations, ever attentive to the Israeli planes ceaselessly circling in the Gazan skies, and to Israeli armoured columns penetrating deeper and deeper into the Strip.
As Israeli commanders frankly admitted, the strategy was to send the tanks and armoured personnel carriers into neighborhoods or refugee camps known as Hamas strongholds and provoke militants into opening fire with their ineffective light weapons — whereupon the soldiers would endeavour "to kill as many of them as possible."
After having done their worst in a particular location, forces would withdraw — to repeat the same procedure in another location on the following day.
Altogether, Israeli generals could boast of an impressive "body count" — two months of constant Gaza attacks resulted in more than 250 dead Palestinians, as against two dead Israeli soldiers (one of them from "friendly fire").
According to the army's communiqués, most of these killed Palestinians were "armed militants" — an assertion strongly disputed by the Palestinian side (and by whatever journalists and human rights observers who managed to collect first hand evidence).
The army also conducted numerous "limited incursions", penetrating only a short distance from the border, but with far from limited results: since it turned out that the tunnel which was used for the raid in which Shalit was captured had been disguised by a Palestinian hothouse, the army systematically destroyed in the vicinity of the border all Palestinian hothouses and many private homes, as well as despoiling numerous fields and orchards "which might hide a new tunnel."
In effect, wrote Nachum Bar'nea in Yediot Aharonot, the already narrow and overcrowded territory of the Gaza Strip was considerably reduced.
There was one thing which all this devastation and untold suffering failed to achieve — namely, what was at least officially its purpose: the release of the captured soldier.
The captors remained obdurate, not budging from their original demand for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in exchange — especially female and underage prisoners.
The Egyptians, with long experience in mediating both between Israelis and Palestinians and between Palestinian factions, bent their best efforts to "squaring the circle" and finding a face-saving formula — namely, "a non-simultaneous deal" where the soldier would be set free and Israel would oblige itself to later release Palestinian prisoners as "an unconnected good will gesture."
The Egyptian mediation efforts were still going on, as was the Israeli devastation of Gaza, on the morning of July 12 — when the Lebanese Hizbullah decided to take a hand, staging its own cross-border raid, enormously raising the ante and opening the floodgates of all-out war.
For restraint, strength is needed
After the end of the war, Hizbullah's leader was to declare, in what seemed a remarkably frank TV interview: "Had I known that the Israelis would react with such a devastating war, I would never have authorized that raid."
True, Hizbullah had been making careful, meticulous preparations for the eventuality of a war with Israel — training its troops to a high pitch of efficacy, stockpiling enormous quantities of missiles, building bunkers and fortifications in the border area and mining all the roads and highways with explosive charges designed to destroy tanks. Still, there is good reason to believe that its leaders did not expect all-out war to break out at just this juncture.
Ever since the unilateral Israeli withdrawal form South Lebanon in May 2000, in whose wake Hizbullah took up effective control of the evacuated area, there have been numerous border incidents — especially in the area of the "Shaba Farms" which the Lebanese consider to be a piece of their territory still held under Israeli occupation — which gave Hizbullah the legitimacy for maintaining its own independent armed forces, while other Lebanese militias had disarmed. Israel sticks to the version that it is Syrian, in token of which it was annexed unilaterally to Israel as was done with the rest of Syrian territory occupied in 1967, the Golan Heights.
In all the earlier border incidents, Israeli retaliations were limited to a few hours of bombardments in the immediate border area. This was also how it went in the most serious of the previous incidents, the one of October 2000, when Hizbullah fighters, using almost precisely the same tactics as were to be repeated in July 2006, staged a cross-border raid and captured three Israeli soldiers.
Also at that time, the Israeli side had contented itself with "a minimum retaliation" and later released many prisoners in order to get back the captured soldiers (or rather, their bodies, as they died of wounds inflicted during their capture).
It was quite well known that Hizbullah had obtained thousands of Katyusha rockets, some of which with a range long enough to hit the whole of northern Israel. Successive governments were in no hurry to open this Pandora's box and engage in a duel of mutual destruction — even if Israel's firepower was greater.
Occasionally a general or a right-wing politician would denounce "the shameful situation" in which "terrorists have established a balance of deterrence with Israel." But meanwhile the tourism industry in the Lebanese border region steadily grew, providing more jobs.
In July 2006, the Palestinians — and the masses all over the Arab world — were full of anger and frustration over what seemed the unwillingness and/or inability of the Arab regimes to provide meaningful help and stop the destruction at Gaza. By striking an unexpected blow at Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians — and at the same time gaining captives who could be exchanged for Lebanese prisoners in Israeli hands — Hizbullah leader Nasrallah could hope to garner considerable political capital, at what seemed an affordable price.
Such calculations ignored, however, the dynamics of the Olmert-Peretz government. As a center-left coalition it had little opposition from the left to restrain it, and considerable pressure from the right and the Army Supreme Command to egg it on to ever increasing aggressiveness.
In Gaza, Olmert had already embarked on a policy of total intransigence and disproportionate retaliation for a cross-border raid and the capture of a soldier. His reaction to the Hizbullah raid was a logical extension, transferring the same policy to a larger canvas with the attack engulfing an entire sovereign state.
The personal trajectory of Olmert and Peretz, who as novices in military matters had to prove themselves, coincided with the already prepared military contingency plans for "swiftly crushing" Hizbullah, which Army Chief-of-Staff Dan Halutz was apparently "itching to try out."
Opposition to the war inside the Israeli society was marginalized. A war frenzy developed with amazing rapidity, sweeping with it most of the usually reasonable people — reminiscent of what happened in Europe in 1914.
The dovish Meretz Party in the Knesset and its allied extra-parliamentary Peace Now movement came out in positive support of the war (though there were dissident voices in both).
Such internationally-known cultural figures as playwright Yehoshua Sobol and writers Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman explicitly supported the war. So did three of the four founders of the Four Mothers Movement, whose campaign in the late 1990's had a major role in getting Israeli troops out of Lebanon.
As the government knew in advance, bombings in Lebanon immediately brought retaliation upon the whole of Israel's northern region, including the major port city of Haifa.
As after the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000 following "The Generous Offers of Barak", there was in the general public a strong perception of Palestinian/Arab/Muslim perfidy ("We withdrew from Gaza and Lebanon, and they repay us with raids and missiles").
This combined with the nuclear efforts of Iran and the abominable statements of Iranian President Ahmedinajad, gave many people a feeling that "this time it is an existential struggle" and that Israel was fighting "The first battle in the Third World War against Islamic Fascism."
This had the result of a widespread callous indifference to the horrific casualties among the Lebanese civilian population. Most Israelis, relying for their information upon the Hebrew-language mass media, were hardly aware of the dead Lebanese civilians at all.
And while those who protested the severity of the bombings found it difficult to make their voice heard, there were quite a few raucous demands for "carpet bombings" and the "flattening" of entire villages and towns, as well as actual criticism of army and air force commanders for being "too scrupulous" and "too moral."
At the crucial emergency cabinet meeting, which was held at the Ministry of Defence at a night hour on July 12 and where the army's plan of attack was approved without demur, one of the most outspoken advocates of massive bombings of civilian areas in Lebanon was a former dove, Justice Minister Haim Ramon.
As was to come out in considerable salacious detail a few weeks later, Ramon seized on his way to the meeting a girl soldier, embraced and kissed her on the lips — allegedly, against her will.
It was this act of casual machoism that seems now to threaten Ramon's career. Not what he did a few minutes later on the same evening — i.e., enthusiastically giving the authorization for bombings which would result in the killing of more than a thousand Lebanese civilians, many of them small children.
Israel had taken no part in The Kosovo War of 1999. Still, it has now become clear that that war greatly influenced the strategic concepts of the Israeli Defence Forces — having provided, as it seemed, a positive proof that "wars can be won by the intensive use of air power."
The new doctrines which were formulated on this basis — even before Air Force general Dan Halutz assumed supreme command, but especially afterwards — implied that tanks, infantry and other ground forces had become largely obsolete (except where needed against the unruly Palestinians, which is essentially a police task rather than a military one) and that the emphasis should be placed on sophisticated new airplanes and electronic equipment.
With regard to Lebanon, the army had prepared a very long list of targets: locations in which Military Intelligence discovered the hiding places of long-range Hizbullah missiles; locations of all kinds of other Hizbullah institutions; the private residences of Hizbullah members; villages, towns and city neighborhoods which were considered Hizbullah strongholds; targets of general Lebanese infrastructure, some of them actually located in areas hostile to Hizbullah...
Altogether, the direct military capacities of Hizbullah were to be considerably damaged and neutralized, its leaders killed or driven into hiding, the communities supporting it terrorized into withdrawing that support, the general Lebanese population made to suffer by infrastructure destruction and a tight air and sea blockade and blame its trouble on Hizbullah, and the Lebanese government of Fuad Siniora forced to take decisive action and disarm its militants.
The government approved Halutz's plan in its entirety, and its accelerated implementation began immediately — starting with putting the Beirut International airport out of commission and making an enormous bonfire of the stores of oil kept there.
The villages of South Lebanon were swiftly emptied, with their population escaping the destruction raining from the sky. The Israeli planes did give some advance warning of where they were going to attack — but in several cases they afterwards bombed the refugee columns heeding the warning, with gruesome results which were shown on international TV (but not in Israel).
The massive air operation took place as planned — but the expected swift victory over Hizbullah failed to materialize. A lot of the Hizbullah missiles had indeed been destroyed, at the cost of considerable "collateral damage." The organization had, however, plenty more left — more than enough for Hizbullah to retaliate with daily salvos of a hundred to two hundred rockets whose like northern Israel had not known in five decades.
In Beirut, the entire Dahiya Quarter at the city's southern side, hitherto home to some 100,000 people, mostly Shi'ites, was made into a pile of rubble — but the senior Hizbullah leaders who used to live there had not stayed for the show.
And from his hiding place, Nasrallah continued to deliver televised speeches — often timed for the hour of the Israeli TV evening news and containing defiant messages aimed directly at the Israeli public. While having himself no knowledge of Hebrew, clearly somebody was providing Nasrallah with daily briefings of the Israeli media.
It was, of course, true that many Lebanese were not precisely happy with Hizbullah having gotten them into deep trouble; indeed, quite a few Lebanese had not been Nasrallah fans to begin with. But it did not necessarily translate into repudiating Hizbullah under fire. With the increasing destruction and carnage, Lebanese of all factions tended to accuse Israel for the bombings carried out by Israeli planes and in many cases to applaud Hizbullah for its ability to fight back.
For its part, among the general Israeli public Nasrallah developed into a devilish "larger than life" character, and the wish to see him dead was more intense even than had been the case with other demonized Arab leaders, such as Arafat or Saddam Hussein. But there was also some grudging admiration; in a Yediot Aharonot opinion poll, a majority of Israelis was found to consider Nasrallah a better war leader than Olmert.
The PM's Churchillesque speeches somehow just failed to strike the right tone. "The home front is strong! The people of the North are steadfast! We are fighting a just war, for our homes! Together we will win!" repeated Olmert, and Peretz, and other ministers and Knesset Members and other public figures in daily speeches.
Indeed, on TV people of the North were shown stating their opposition to a cease-fire. "Since it has already started, let the army finish the job, get rid of Hizbullah once and for all!" But only gradually did it become clear that quite a few of the people of the North — in some communities much more than a half — had simply fled the missiles, those who had families or friends in other parts of the country, or could afford to stay in a hotel. Mostly it was the weaker part of the population that was left to deal with the situation of daily bombardments — a situation that some commentators compared to hurricane inflicted New Orleans, last year.
The government relief services proved unable to help the people stuck day after day in overcrowded bomb shelters — with sometimes all shops closed and no way of buying basic foods.
It fell mainly to private charity organizations to organize some basic relief. Arkady Gaydamak — a rather shady multi-millionaire, who is wanted by the law in France due to some suspicious arms deals in Angola and who is reportedly seeking a political career in Israel — established from his private fortune "a temporary camp" on the sea shore, with enough space to house some 7000 people. The government declared its intention to build a similar camp, but the idea got mired in endless bureaucracy until at last the war ended.
Nearly half of the fifty civilians killed in the Hizbullah rocket attacks on Israeli territory were actually Arab citizens of Israel, which is not surprising, since the Katyusha is a highly inaccurate weapon and half the population of the north is Arabic. Also the city of Haifa, a major Hizbullah target, has a sizeable Arab community.
As it turned out, the targeted Arab towns and villages had no air-raid shelters or sirens installed — either because the government did not think they would be targeted, or as part of the general neglect of basic infrastructure in the Arab sector.
The common danger of the missiles and the common daily bereavement might have served to draw Israeli Jews and Arabs closer together in mutual solidarity. But it did not happen. The Arabs — including the direct families of those killed — refused to declare their support to the war. In the media and the political system, the outspoken opposition of Arabs to the war was translated as "support for Hizbullah."
Thus, the war had the result of increasing the raucous voices of those calling the Arabs "a Fifth Column." The odious Avigdor Lieberman has built his career on such calls, and polls indicate that support for his party is on the rise. Nor is he alone — his rival on the right, former Brigadier Effi Etam found the time ripe for an explicit call to expel the Arabs from the West Bank as well as "removing the Arab Fifth Column from Israeli politics."
By the time the war was a week old, it was already clear that the air war was not going to achieve the far-reaching aims which Olmert and Peretz confidently proclaimed in the first days.
The Air Force had done its worst, in 24-hour bombings, destruction and killings — aided by the artillery and the navy gunships cruising off the Lebanese shore. But Hizbullah was not broken, as evident in its daily salvos of missiles on Northern Israel — with in fact only a small fraction of the firepower of the Israeli bombs raining down on Lebanon, but enough to dislocate the life of hundreds of thousands of Israelis.
Furthermore, Hizbullah had some additional surprises to display, such as the ground-to-sea missile shot at an Israeli warship off the Beirut shore, killing four of its crew. Israeli ships have blockaded and bombarded Lebanon with complete impunity since the 1970s, and the crew did not even bother to put on a warning system designed to give warnings against just such attacks.
In the thinking of the Chief-of-Staff himself, there seemed to be no place for such mundane things as protecting troops against enemy fire. Former Air Force commander Halutz thought in terms of unchallenged aerial superiority. His idea was to systematically destroy Lebanon's electric power stations, and inform the Lebanese that unless they surrender "Lebanon would just have no electricity for the next two years" (as a Ma'ariv article quite approvingly put it).
This cute idea was, however, vetoed by the Americans. The Bush Administration had supported the Israeli offensive to the hilt, outspokenly opposing — as much as did Olmert himself — the idea of an early ceasefire, and preventing such forums as the UN Security Council and the G-8 Summit from adopting resolutions to that end.
Israel's war on Hizbullah was perceived as part and parcel of the worldwide "war on terrorism." Indeed, American generals felt increasingly disappointed and frustrated to find Israel as bogged down as they had become themselves in Iraq.
Even so, the Americans did realize that destroying Lebanon's electricity generation capacity for years to come might or might not bring Hizbullah down, but would certainly destroy the government of Lebanese PM Siniora whom Washington had classified among "The Good Guys." (In fact, the Siniora Government had resulted from the celebrated anti-Syrian "Cedar Revolution" of last year.)
With recourse to this extra-draconian measure ruled out, the government could have consented to a cease-fire — proclaiming that the exorbitant price already exacted from Lebanon would serve as a sufficient retribution and effective deterrence against any new such raid. Indeed, though it did not at the time get to the general public knowledge, such a proposal did come up in the senior political and military echelons, but it was not seriously considered.
Taking such a course, however, would have forced Olmert and Peretz to swallow far too many rash dire threats and boastful promises and proclamations which they have made just a few days before (and which the Americans have moreover backed up, putting their own prestige on the line). Specifically, ending the war would have obliged Olmert to start negotiations for release of the captured Israeli soldiers, on the basis of a prisoner exchange, taking back even more firm and high-handed recent declarations which he had just made.
The other option, if the war was to continue at all, was to send ground troops back into Lebanon — the one act which hitherto all commentators agreed no government would undertake, so deep was the trauma of the army's eighteen years in the "Lebanese Swamp."
Faced with the dilemma between two unpalatable options, the government opted for a classic "rotten compromise" — i.e., to send troops into Lebanon by gradual piecemeal steps, without any clear coherent strategy and with operational plans being repeatedly changed and revised.
At first, the army tried to copy in Lebanon the methods which were so effective against the Palestinians in Gaza — a quick series of raids into Hizbullah-held territory, without keeping the soldiers too long on any one spot.
But Hizbullah had prepared for this eventuality over the past six years, the invasion routes were highly predictable due to the rugged mountain terrain, and the militants had advanced anti-tank missiles and long-prepared hidden positions from which to fire them.
The Israeli Merkava Tank, declared by its builders to be "the world's safest tank", proved far from impervious to missiles. And also the method of taking over civilian houses and making of them military positions, often used in the Palestinian territories, turned out to be very dangerous in Lebanon — since the Hizbullah missiles proved easily able to penetrate even through thick walls.
A force was sent on a raid into the town of Bint Jbeil, which government propagandists dubbed "the capital of Hizbullah." Then they were ordered to stay there, and a general proudly announced, "Bint Jbeil is in our hands" — though in fact the soldiers held only a small part of this sizeable town, in normal times the home of tens of thousands of people. On the following day the soldiers were ambushed and eight of them killed, whereupon the rest were hastily withdrawn. This handed Hizbullah a handsome propaganda victory — and the army sent the soldiers to conquer the town a second time, entailing further casualties...
There was also a highly-publicized raid by elite Israeli commandos on the town of Ba'albek, deep behind the Hizbullah lines — which was described in the media in glowing heroic terms but whose entire achievement turned out to be the capture of an elderly Lebanese greengrocer whose name happened to be Hassan Nasrallah (he is a distant cousin of the Hizbullah leader of the same name).
As the public was to learn some weeks later, many officers were furious with this raid, considering it as the irresponsible risking of 200 soldiers' lives (the helicopters were in concrete danger from Hizbullah missiles) in the service of an empty PR trick.
And meanwhile, the government authorized the mobilization of several reserve divisions, with the reservists kept in tent camps on the Israeli side of the border and told to await further orders. While waiting, twelve of them were killed by a single rocket. As it turned out, their commanders failed to take quite simple precautions that might have saved their lives.
Meanwhile, Olmert's time for waging war started to run out. Under increasing pressure on the international arena, the Americans made clear that they could not continue indefinitely with providing him a diplomatic cover. American generals and neocons were openly disappointed with the lack of a decisive Israeli victory, but were also becoming skeptical of the Israeli armed forces' chance to achieve such a victory if given further time.
Moreover, Bush seemed in imminent danger of losing his best international ally, Tony Blair of Britain, whose opposition to a Lebanese ceasefire and enthusiastic espousal of the Olmert stance proved highly unpopular with the British public and further undermined his already fragile political situation.
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice embarked on a Middle East shuttle tour, aimed at achieving an agreed formula for a ceasefire on the basis of stationing a strong UN force in South Lebanon (an idea which had already been thoroughly discussed in the various diplomatic forums since the beginning of the war). Brokering a ceasefire would have constituted a feather in her personal cap, in readiness for a possible contesting of the 2008 presidential elections.
Rice was closeted with Olmert in Jerusalem, with her aides telling the press that "a ceasefire deal" was "all but sewn up", when the news came of an Israeli bomb totally demolishing a three-storey residential building and burying under the ruins the families which had been seeking with their children a safe refuge in the basement. At first the number of killed civilians was estimated at 60, afterwards it turned out to be "only" 28. As it happened, it was at Qana Village in South Lebanon — the very same location where scores of Lebanese civilians found their death by an Israeli artillery shell hitting a UN camp, in the notorious previous atrocity at 1996.
The bloody photos from the scene were shown all over the world, and caused especially an uproar in Lebanon itself — where the Siniora Government was obliged to tell the Secretary of State that in the Lebanese public the US was being directly blamed for the carnage and that her return to Lebanese soil was "undesirable and impracticable" for the moment.
Rice reportedly tried to convince Olmert to put a halt to the offensive in Lebanon, She had only the partial backing of the President, and got a partial success: the Israeli air offensive was halted for 48 hours (the announcement of this measure came from the White House spokesperson, rather than from any Israeli official — which placed Olmert in a bit uncomfortable situation). But the temporary cessation of the aerial bombardments was "counterbalanced" by the government on the very same day authorizing a large-scale ground invasion — though "only to the depth of a few kilometres."
This at last aroused the mainstream peace movement: Peace Now and Meretz held their first protest against the war (rather, against its extension — they still claimed that it had been justified to begin with). And for their part, the writers' trio — Oz, Yehoshua and Grossman — now made an impassioned plea for a ceasefire. (As it turned out, Grossman's own son was to be among the soldiers killed in those futile last days.)
On the diplomatic arena, the US found itself for once unable to dictate the terms of solving a Middle East crisis, and had to hold intensive and intricate negotiations with France, which — as the country supposed to provide the largest contingent of soldiers to the proposed UN force — had a strong bargaining position, and which (for good reasons) the Lebanese trusted far more than they trusted the Americans.
Finally, at midnight (Israeli time) on the night of August 11, the news came from New York: the Security Council had unanimously adopted "Resolution 1701" on the basis of the American-French draft. Olmert immediately announced Israel's acceptance of the resolution. The war seemed to be over; certainly, many of the soldiers at the front thought so, and congratulated themselves on their good luck.
They were, unfortunately, premature. At the very same time that the government declared its acceptance of the ceasefire, it also sent the army on by far the biggest offensive of the entire war: some 35,000 troops were ordered deeper into Lebanon in a futile last-ditch effort to create some "facts on the ground."
By the time the ceasefire finally went into effect, two and a half days later, thirty-four Israeli soldiers (and an unknown number of Lebanese militants and civilians) were added to the fatalities. Olmert and Peretz could not point to the slightest achievement that would make this price seem in any way worthwhile.
On the morning of August 14, the Lebanese nightmare was at last over (in Gaza the carnage still continued, completely unnoticed). The streets of Israeli cities were still filled with bumper stickers reading "We Shall Win!" which had been produced and distributed in enormous numbers by Bank Leumi (Israel National Bank), complete with the bank's logo on their corner. But it was agreed by virtually everybody that Israel had lost the war.
Though only few said that the war should not have been started at all, quite some felt that it should have been ended earlier, and especially that the last-minute offensive should never have been undertaken. On the other hand, there were a huge lot complaining that the war was stopped too early; that it should have continued "until victory"; that the ground invasion should have started sooner; that the bombardments had been "too cautious".
The most vocal voices were those of soldiers — reservists, especially, who were discharged and free to talk to the press — who spoke less of grand strategy and contentious political issues, and more of concrete failures and fiascos which they had experienced: of being sent into battle with obsolete and faulty weapons and equipment, after years of having hardly trained for the tasks they would have to undertake; of having had to provide vital items from their own money; of the collapse of army logistics and being stuck deep inside Lebanon with virtually no food or water; of commanders issuing contradictory and senseless orders, and staying behind to conduct the battle from the computer screens of their safe command centers.
The media, which had for more than a month patriotically muzzled itself, burst out in floods of sensational revelations, papers and TV programs savagely competing and trying to outdo each other in splashing the most sensational and shocking expose over centrefold pages.
In the opinion polls the ratings of the government as a whole, and especially of Olmert and Peretz personally plummeted sharply, while the ratings of the right wing parties and leaders rose (though many in the general public were not quite happy with the prospect of replacing them by the Likud's Binyamin Netanyahu, with his less than admirable record, or with Lieberman's simple-minded demagoguery).
Within just a few days after the formal end of the war, Israeli public life assumed the form of a free-for-all general melee. The Olmert-Peretz-Halutz trio came under considerable fire, and alternated between closing ranks and attempts to make each other the scapegoat.
Olmert and especially Peretz faced increasing restiveness, major and minor rebellions inside their respective parties, while Halutz faced mounting criticism of fellow officers, openly from retired generals and less open from serving ones. And there were other bickerings, of generals against generals and junior officers against generals and protests and bitter grievances of all kinds.
At least two generals made themselves conspicuous in outspoken criticism: Moshe Ya'alon, former Army Chief-of-Staff sacked by Sharon a year and half ago, who had been holed up at a Washington think-tank and biding his time ever since; and Shaul Mofaz, who never forgave Olmert for demoting him from Minister of Defence to Minister of Transportation.
Mofaz and Ya'alon (each one separately, as there is very little love lost between them) launched enormous media broadsides, roundly condemning the conduct of the war — and were answered by counter-broadsides, which accused both of them of bearing the lion's share of responsibility for the war's failures and fiascos, since both of them had been in recent years in charge of preparing the army for the contingency of just such a war.
Adding to the atmosphere of general disintegration was the coincidence that exactly at this time the police started an intensive investigation of none other than the President of The State of Israel, Moshe Katzav (whose position is purely titular) on no less than seven charges of sexually harassing women employees in his present and previous positions — an investigation likely to lead to criminal charges.
The Israeli system has a time-honoured solution for this kind of situation: forming a Judicial Commission of Inquiry, whose members are appointed by the Supreme Court and which has a complete independence in conducting its investigations and publishing its conclusions and recommendations.
The catch is that only the government can decide upon the appointment of such a commission — and no government is likely to appoint a commission capable of terminating itself, unless forced to by an enormous tide of public pressure.
It did happen twice before, in the aftermath of other wars which were generally considered a failure: In 1974, after the Yom Kippur War when Israel had suffered a humiliating surprise attack by Egypt and Syria, the appointment of a Commission of Inquiry ended up with ending the career of PM Golda Meir and dealing Defence Minister Moshe Dayan a blow from which he never truly recovered; and in 1982 — after the Sabra and Shatila Massacres — the commission kicked Ariel Sharon out of the Ministry of Defence and into twenty years of eclipse and exile from the corridors of power.
A well-organized group known as "The Movement for a Better Government" took up the task of trying to arrange such an occurrence for a third time in Israel, by "a non-partisan campaign against government corruption, uniting the entire people — right and left, religious and secular, rich and poor."
Spontaneity and "white-hot anger" were provided by the disgruntled reservists. Extreme-right militants were also involved, concerned less with the war and more with getting rid of Olmert and preventing any settlement evacuation, and some left-wingers — paraded to the media as a "counter-balance."
Quite a few manifestations of this protest appeared and were duly reported in the media — but still, far less than the outpouring of a general, overwhelming popular anger and protest that the organizers hoped for. And when they played their ultimate card and called for a mass rally in Tel-Aviv's Rabin Square, some tens of thousands turned up — a crowd which would have looked enormous in smaller squares, but was a bit dwarfed in this venue, and was certainly a far cry from the legendary 1982 mass rally on the same location which had brought Sharon down.
Faced with a not quite overwhelming pressure, Olmert made a not quite overwhelming concession. He agreed to give the commission of inquiry rather broad powers, but kept the appointment of its members in his own hands. Specifically, he took care to preclude any possibility that the commission would be headed by Justice Aharon Barak, who has just retired from a long term as President of the Supreme Court — a very dominant, assertive and charismatic person, who would have had no hesitation about terminating by a withering report the career even of a Prime Minister.
Instead, Olmert made sure that the actual commission be headed by Justice Eliyahu Winograd, who has far less of a public stature and independent habits. A man who could be managed — or so, at least, the Prime Minister hopes.
Shortly before the end of the war, a religious group that seems to have a lot of money published and distributed by the tens of thousands a brochure printed on glossy paper, with the title "We told you so!"
The text, accompanied by colour photos, set out a simple, clearly comprehensible theory: The government of Israel has withdrawn from Lebanon and afterwards from Gaza, though in both cases wise and far-seeing people (including and especially the group's own rabbi) had warned that this was a terrible mistake.
The evil Arabs had used the evacuated territory in order to shoot missiles on Israel, necessitating the sending of soldiers back in, and proving the wisdom of the warnings made by the afore-mentioned rabbi and others of the same mind.
The conclusion was obvious: it had been a mistake to withdraw from any territory, and the mistake should not be repeated. Especially, a withdrawal from the West Bank (the brochure of course called it "Judea and Samaria") would mean that in the next war the missiles will fall on Tel-Aviv, too. And a next war was sure to come; Hizbullah was no more than the outpost of an Islamic Axis of Evil, Iran and Syria were hatching nefarious schemes. The very idea of peace was a dangerous naive nonsense, Islam by its nature was implacably hostile and would always be hostile.
What Israelis had to do was to pray and trust in God, but except for that they had to be strong and tough, give a martial education to their youths and give the army as much money as it wants and needs in order to do better next time.
The group that published this brochure was by no means unique. Quite a few others started speaking in much the same vein — not all of them religious or identified with the extreme right. Echoes of the same kind of talk could be discerned in the writings of some mainstream commentators and editorial writers, and in speeches by politicians.
The generals were certainly happy with the idea that the Defence budgets would be considerably increased, and the idea of cutting them buried (which had been espoused, among others, by Amir Peretz up to the day of his being appointed Defence Minister).
The popularity of Olmert's Convergence Plan plummeted even more than Olmert's personal rating. During the war, he had still spoken of his intention to carry out the plan, and even predicted that the war would give it "a new momentum' (which drew an angry outcry from the settlers and their supporters). But soon after the ceasefire, Olmert declared that "Convergence had gone into deep freeze."
That statement was considered to be part of an Olmert effort to draw Lieberman into his cabinet. Another signal to Lieberman was a big headline according to which Olmert was considering to take up, as his cabinet's "new agenda" instead of the Convergence, a change of the electoral system so as to create "something similar to a presidential system" and "make the executive branch more strong."
Lieberman had always supported such ideas, and made no secret of his dream to one day become himself such a strong executive president. However, Lieberman reportedly had a high price for joining the Olmert Government and "bailing out the PM" — no less than getting the Ministry of Defence, in Peretz's place. That much Olmert seemed disinclined to pay, at least for the moment.
The right-wing conclusions were not the only ones that could be drawn from Israel's recent experiences. In the immediate wake of the war, the long-dormant Geneva Initiative placed big billboards all over the country, with the text "Victory — only by Negotiations! Talk to the Palestinians — Now!"
For his part Yossi Beilin, Meretz party leader whose brainchild Geneva was, tried hard to compensate for his initial support of the war in Lebanon by a constant stream of interviews to the Israeli and international media, refurbishing his dovish credentials. As Beilin endlessly reiterated, it was not withdrawal as such which has proven a failure, but unilateral withdrawal implemented without trying to achieve a peace agreement — indeed, undertaken in order to avoid paying the price that a peace agreement required.
As is well known, Sharon had withdrawn unilaterally from Gaza in order to keep large portions of the West Bank, and Olmert's intended convergence had the same aim.
Beilin, however, also extended the same analysis further backwards. He pointed out that in 2000 Ehud Barak had a real option for a peace agreement with Syria, which would have entailed peace with Lebanon as well, including a clause about the disarming of Hizbullah. But the price for that was a complete withdrawal from the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in 1967. In order to avoid paying that price, Barak chose to withdraw unilaterally from Lebanon and keep the Golan, thereby giving Syria every incentive to continue providing Hizbullah with a stream of the most modern missiles.
At least in the view of some, the logical conclusion in the here-and-now was to correct that mistake and try to talk to the Syrians and extract them out of the alliance with Iran.
Peretz, also in need of recreating a dovish image for himself, made a speech in that vein. Unfortunately, it coincided with a rather bellicose speech made on the same day by Syrian President Assad. More decisive, a sharp reaction was quick to arrive from Washington: Bush was firm in continuing to place the Syrians among the Bad Guys of the Axis of Evil, and would be displeased with any Israeli move to extract them from there.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese ceasefire stabilized. UN troops started arriving in considerable numbers, despite a French display of cold feet at the crucial moment, with the situation saved by the Italians. Contrary to what many expected, Hizbullah made no effort to start a guerrilla war against the Israeli troops still holding some parcels of Lebanese territory.
Rather, the main Lebanese grievance was the air and sea blockade of their shores which Olmert maintained for several weeks after the ceasefire came into effect, seriously impeding Lebanon's chances of starting to repair the enormous war damages. Mounting international pressure finally persuaded the PM to leave the Lebanese alone. Thereafter, the focus of international diplomatic attention shifted back to the Palestinians, who had been left completely in the shadow over the past two months.
Tony Blair — arriving in the Middle East just as his career at London was drawing to an ignominious end — seemed concerned with trying to salvage for himself at least some mark in history.
In Jerusalem, Blair strongly prevailed upon Olmert to restart negotiations with Abu Mazen "with no further delay" and got from him some kind of a promise to that effect. At Ramallah, he congratulated the Palestinians on their renewed efforts to achieve a National Unity Cabinet involving Hamas, Fatah and the smaller factions, effectively promising European support to such a cabinet and holding out a ray of hope to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian public sector workers who had gotten no salary over the past half a year.
And so, as we go into print a diplomatic move seems to be gathering momentum in the Palestinian arena. The interlinked moves would include, together with the formation of the new Palestinian cabinet, a return of the captured Israeli soldier in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Despite his earlier tough stance, Olmert seems by now resigned to this step — but as always in such situations, the sensitive issue of "prisoners with blood on their hands" still requires further complicated haggling.
Connected to that would be a ceasefire, putting an end to both the massive pounding and strangulation of Gaza by Israel and the quite ineffective shooting back of Palestinian rockets.
And after that, actual peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians are supposed to start, for the first time since January 2000 — though one can doubt whether Olmert has either the will to pursue such talks seriously or the necessary public standing inside Israel, given the extremely shaken and disheveled condition of his cabinet after only a few months of existence.
Or could the atmosphere still be improved? There is that other effort, by the Arab countries, to revive their peace initiative — adopted at the proposal of Saudi Arabia in the Beirut Summit of April 2002, which was then immediately drowned out by the Israeli invasion of the West Bank cities.
Now, the Arabs intend to let the UN Security Council officially endorse that initiative, by which Israel is offered full peace with the entire Arab world in exchange for a full withdrawal from the territories occupied since 1967.
The Olmert Government has already indicated its displeasure with this initiative, and Foreign Minister Livni was dispatched to Washington to get American help in torpedoing it. But to quite a few Israelis, this Arab initiative seems one of the most surprising and hopeful things to happen after a far too long stretch of bleakness and misery.
The Editors
