Open Letter to Tzipi Livni Israel's Strategic Bind The New Idolatry

It was a fitting finale to a war most Israelis would rather forget.

As thousands followed the coffins of IDF soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, whose bodies arrived in Israel two years after the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War, a sense of sobriety, introspection and catharsis descended on the Jewish state. The fallen, one of whom was a newly graduated law student and the other a newly married environmental engineer, were kidnapped and killed by Hizbollah guerrillas in July ’06 in an incident that mushroomed into six weeks of mutual bombings and sporadic ground battles, in the aftermath of which 163 Israelis and an estimated 900 Lebanese were dead, while entire areas between Beirut and Haifa were left scarred, and in some cases also leveled.

The deal, whereby Israel released a notorious Lebanese terrorist in turn for bodies has left Israelis wondering not only about the wisdom of the deal, but about that entire war’s strategic costs and benefits.

The pessimists say the terrorist-for-bodies deal symbolized Hizbollah’s real victory, which is military and political. Militarily, the Shi’ite Lebanese organization has restored, multiplied and improved its missile arsenal that now includes 40,000 rockets that can cover most of Israel, and politically it has consolidated its position as Lebanon’s best-organized and assertive minority.

Meanwhile, continue the pessimists, Israel’s failure in summer ’06 to subdue Hizbollah inspired Hamas, which had taken over Gaza half-a-year prior to the war, and Iran, which has been further emboldened in its nuclear ambitions and Jihadist rhetoric.

The government of course rejects this analysis. In its view, the deployment of a sizable UN force as well as Lebanese troops along Israel’s northern border as a result of UN Resolution 1701 is a major strategic improvement, considering that Hizbollah no longer grips the border. Similarly, Israel’s harsh response to the provocation it faced in July ’06 made it plain that the Jewish state is prepared to respond to such situations even at the risk of war, thus improving Israel’s deterrence.

As for the broader region, the optimists add that Israel’s reported aerial attack in September ’07 on a nuclear installation in northeastern Syria has demonstrated both its willingness and ability to strike far when the need arises.

Lastly, this school contends that the ongoing talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority are valuable as they are laying the foundations for a future permanent settlement, even if Gaza for now remains beyond the PA’s tutelage.

In fact, Israel’s position in its region remains unclear so long as the future of the Iranian axis remains unclear.


FOR MOST ISRAELIS, the most disappointing protagonist in summer ’06, more than the politicians, was the IDF.

The army’s failure to act swiftly in order to deal Hizbolla a blow that would be seen internationally as a clear defeat came as a shock, particularly to the thousands of Israelis who had participated in Israel’s more successful, previous wars. What, then happened, and what does it mean for Israel’s strategic standing?

One thing that impacted negatively was the IDF’s unprecedented and coincidental leadership at the time by a pilot. Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz, who has since resigned, had been installed by Ariel Sharon who evidently planned to compensate for the former air force commander’s lack of experience in ground warfare with Sharon’s own experience as a general. But by the time the war broke out Sharon had long left the scene, and the charismatic and over-confident Halutz’s grip on the military was unchallenged. The result was a fateful overreliance on aerial and artillery attacks, which in line with military theories that go back to the 50s failed to defeat the enemy on the ground.

Beyond this personal aspect there was a major intelligence failure, as the intelligence community underplayed Hizbollah’s materiel and bellicosity. Lastly, and as part of the same malaise, when finally ordered to launch a ground attack, the IDF struck many as ill-trained and cumbersome.

The good news for Israel in all this is that the first to take the war’s failings to heart has been the IDF itself.

Beyond the replacements of Halutz, his deputy and the commanders of the Northern Command and the Lebanese border, the IDF has embarked on elaborate ground maneuvers in an effort to brace for the kind of ground warfare that some has prematurely assumed obsolete. Even before this decade’s terror challenges, experts led by Hebrew University military historian Martin van-Creveld contended that the Iran-Iraq War that ended in 1988 was the last fully conventional war. Such academic statements are of course not prone to make entire armies change course, let alone in ways that entail reducing personnel, hardware and budgets, but the IDF’s empirical experience this decade, while compelled to confront a massive terror offensive on the home front, made it gradually focus its thoughts and resources on what came to be termed as low-intensity warfare.

As it were, on this front the IDF had actually earned universal admiration, developing tactics and arms geared specifically to target, for instance, suicide bombers as well as the labs, vehicles, workshops and operators behind them. The more the army developed the specialized pilots, marksmen and commandos that all this required, and the more it was assigned with confronting terror cells in the thick of urban areas, the more it neglected the classic battlefield. In summer ’06 that neglect exacted its price, both mentally and logistically.

Then again, the challenge of ’06, though closer in character to the older wars than to the new, low-intensity war, was nonetheless unique even as such, since Hizbollah did not deploy mass units, let alone mechanized ones, only an agile artillery of sorts and fortifications manned by small infantry units. The artillery even included operators skipping positions on motorcycles. In other words, the IDF’s apparent suspicion that the battle tank is on its way to the war museum may yet prove valid, but this does not preclude the fact the in the future as in the past wars will still be won on the ground, and as such will still involve ground-based maneuvering of well trained and highly motivated troops led by skilled and daring commanders.

This conceptual negligence is what went wrong from an Israeli viewpoint down in the battlefield in summer ’06. The rest, most notably the air force’s performance and the foot soldiers’ enlistment, motivation and delivery were actually encouraging. After all, the IDF killed many more Hizbollah soldiers than it lost, and in every local clash between the two armies’ troops the IDF prevailed. Israeli soldiers’ reports, that when cornered Hizbollah soldiers took out pistols and shot themselves in the head, means that they were given orders to avoid captivity or any other appearance of defeat. But defeated they were, when it came to meeting IDF units eyeball to eyeball.


BEYOND THE battlefield, Israel suffered a setback in that Hizbollah managed to harass its population for six weeks, and survive. A future clash, it is therefore assumed in Israel, will have to target Hizbollah’s command chain and troops, so that the estimated 70 percent of Lebanon who are not Shi’ites can be emboldened to confront them. For now, the war has enhanced Hizbollah’s stranglehold on Lebanon’s politics in a way that is disadvantageous to Israel, and which has also undone some of the Cedar Revolution’s gains of winter ’05, when street demonstrations following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri forced the Syrian army to leave Lebanon.

As for Iran and Hamas, while there is no denying their emergence from the war with even greater self-confidence, there has also been a downside from their viewpoint. Until summer ’06 Iran’s sway beyond its borders seemed mainly moral and occasionally logistical, but it never added up to a serious effort to establish regional hegemony. Now diplomats suspect that Iran’s quest is to wrest Beirut, the Arab world’s culturally westernmost outpost, and through it pressure Israel simultaneously along the Mediterranean coast, between Gaza and Beirut.

Such a design is a nightmare mot only to Israel but also to Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, not to mention the Christian world. In this regard, Israel actually emerged with a little-discussed advantage from the war, as its diplomats now find it easier to present Iran and its allies as the region’s Number One de-stabilizers, and a potential threat to the entire world’s peace.

This is also why Damascus is cautiously reconsidering its foreign policy.

Though an ally of the Iranian regime, partly due to the ruling Alawi minority’s historic links to Shi’ism, Syria apparently suspects that it’s time to change horses, the way Anwar Sadat did when he switched his allegiance from Moscow to Washington. Siding with Iran when its main Arab enemy was Saddam Hussein was one thing, but siding with Ahmedinejad when he provokes much of the entire civilized world is another thing.

From Israel’s viewpoint it would have been nicer to meet Syrian negotiators who do not live under the delusion that a proxy of theirs had just dealt Israel a knockout, but from the Israeli viewpoint the vulnerability the Syrians displayed in fall ’07, when their air defenses reportedly malfunctioned, was much more meaningful, as it proved their air defenses useless.

In sum, the Second Lebanon War has left the Middle East even more unnerved, vigil and diplomatically perplexed than it ordinarily is. And nowhere is this confusion of hope and despair more evident than in the Palestinian arena. The schizophrenic situation whereby the elected Palestinian president is negotiating peace with the same Jewish state that the elected Hamas government vows to destroy is but a symptom of a region torn between conflicting vectors.

In fact, seen this way it is very possible that the Second Lebanon War was not the cause, but the result of a war that had been waged long before 2006, and whose focus is not the Arab-Israeli conflict but the post-Cold War Middle East. That war pits a pro-western Sunni Arab elite against an anti-Western Iran that is nurturing an axis that, if it’s up to the Mullahs, would proceed from Tehran through Basra, Damascus and Beirut to Gaza.

Some Western diplomats hope that the Iranians will be disarmed around negotiating tables where their axis will lose crucial links, like the Palestinians or the Syrians. Others hope that Tehran itself retreat from the brink, for instance in the wake of the new American intention to open an interest section in Tehran. Then again, a military setback would surely be no less effective in dealing Tehran’s regional stock the blow it never got in the wake of the Second Lebanon War.