AJC Mideast Briefing

"Off with their Heads"- Or the Beginning of the Healing Process? Israel Prepares  for an Inquiry into What Went Wrong with the War A Special Report August 25, 2006 Dr. Eran Lerman Director Israel/Middle East Office One need not be a devotee of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, Foreign Minister Tzippi Livni, or Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz to wonder aloud if the call for commission(s) of inquiry is what Israel needs right now: Another self-inflicted wound? Another rich mine of evidence about Israel's "fatal weakness" for Hassan Nasrallah to dig into as he prepares for the PSYOPs of the day after? And yet the establishment of an official commission is now all but certain. Too much has happened; too many people feel they were abandoned, betrayed, sold short, or held back when they were just ready to go on the decisive offensive. Too many keen and credible observers, from Ari Shavit of Ha'aretz to Ralph Peters of the New York Post (who visited here as an AJC Project Interchange guest), came to the conclusion that the IDF may be a good fighting (and learning) force, but the outcome reflected a country poorly served by its military and political leadership. Glib dismissals will no longer do: Some kind of a mechanism must be found to assign responsibility, if not guilt. "The old ladies are already knitting by the guillotine," and the wider public wants some answers. There is a price to be paid for being the only self-searching democracy in the region, but it is worth paying, in the long run. There are five different configurations possible for such an inquiry: 1. An internal commission within the Ministry of Defense , already created (in what many saw as a quick but clumsy political gambit) under the chairmanship of a former chief of staff, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak. It has good persons on its roster; but, given that Shahak was himself a close personal adviser to Peretz during the fighting, there are questions raised as to the scope of its inquiry-too narrowly focused on the performance of the IDF rather than the government as a whole. 2. A mandate given to the State Comptroller-General (mevaker hamedinah , roughly equivalent to the GAO in the U.S.) to ask questions and seek answers. Unlike his polite predecessors, the present holder of this position, Micha Lindenstrauss, is an abrasive (some say, self-aggrandizing) former district judge who does not hesitate to call culprits by name and suggest legal proceedings when necessary. He is already tooling his office to do the work, whatever Olmert decides. 3. A Special Knesset Commission , probably mandated by legislation (or simply constituted for the purpose by the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee), which could summon witnesses, hold public and classified hearings, and write a report (without legal implications, but politically significant). 4. A "governmental" commission , not unlike the U.S. 9/11 Commission, appointed by the cabinet as a whole and given a much broader scope, but with limited or no legal powers or binding authority (which may be what Olmert would like to create, if he could safely get away with it). 5. A National Commission of Inquiry (va'adat hakirah mamlakhtit ), a unique Israeli institution with a formal status under law. Such commissions have made themselves famous over the years: In 1973-74 it was Chief Justice Shimon Agranat's commission that exonerated the political level, Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, of failings in the run-up to and the first disastrous days of the Yom Kippur War, but did require the chief of staff, David (Dado) Elazar, to leave his post-he died, heartbroken, soon afterwards, and to many Israelis remained a tragic hero-and also damned the head of the Directorate of Military Intelligence, Eli Zeira, and some of his officers, for failing to see the writing on the wall. In 1982, it was Judge Yitzhak Kahan's commission that did cross the political threshold, and directly blamed the minister of defense at the time, Ariel Sharon, for failing to prevent the massacre (by Lebanese militias) of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps; he was barred from the position (and indeed, even when elected prime minister, never held it again), and other army and intelligence officers were also held responsible.  In 2002, another Supreme Court justice, Theodor Orr, presided over a commission that looked into the events in Arab areas of Israel at the onset of the violent conflict with the Palestinians, in which fourteen were killed by police. Again, personal conclusions were drawn: Shlomo Ben-Ami, by then no longer in government, was barred from holding the position of minister for internal security in the future; former Prime Minister Ehud Barak was censured; and several police officers had their careers curtailed. This last aspect of the vaadat hakirah mamlakhtit commission's powers-the capacity to assign personal responsibility-is at the root of the demand for this form of inquiry (and there are certainly political aspirations driving some who call for it), but is also the reason why some noninterested voices are raised against it. They warn that it would turn the conduct of national security affairs, at this crucial moment, into a tangle of personal fears and evasions (to judge by history, Israeli leaders almost never resign under such pressures), complete with the introduction of lawyers and media consultants into the process (which has already begun to happen). But the momentum may be irresistible. What will be on the inquirers' agenda? There are three concrete issues-enumerated below-and a broader, less defined, but profound sense that the truly important question has less to do with "what we did" and more with "who we thought we were." It is this deep undercurrent that troubles Ari Shavit (and in a mirror image, was celebrated by Thomas Friedman): Were we all swept away-myself included, at times, as some of my weekly reports will attest-by the notion that it was all about Warren Buffet and "the economy, stupid"; the image of Israel as an investors' paradise, surging ahead as a high-tech power. The obverse side of this coin was a state, and a government, less and less attentive to the dangers around it (hence the decision to give a labor union leader, Amir Peretz, the Ministry of Defense, "as if this were Norway," so that the Ministry of Finance would remain in the hands of one of Olmert's loyalists); and at the same time, often alienated from the needs of the poor and the peripheral groups in society. It is this fixation with the needs of the so-called "Tel Aviv bubble" and the Stock Exchange that may explain much of what has happened, and it has already led to a rebellion by some Labor Party members of Knesset-led by Avishai Braverman-against the decision to shift the costs of the war to budget cuts in social services. Still, the specific mandate of any commission will probably encompass this aspect of our lives only indirectly, through an inquiry into what is coming to be perceived as "what went wrong": 1. Readiness: It is now beyond dispute that there were problems with the preparation of the IDF for war. This time-and this is not simply the assessment of a former practitioner-it was not Intelligence, per se, which was to blame (except in some cases, such as the failure to warn that Hezbollah possessed C-802 anti-ship missiles); the information was there, even about the transfer of state-of-the-art Russian anti-tank missiles from Syria to Hezbollah. But it was not always disseminated to those who needed it; it was not acted upon, for budgetary reasons, by providing expensive countermeasures to the tank units (which accounts for the high proportion of their loss of lives in battle); and more generally, it was not translated into a systematic plan to have the reserve tank divisions, the backbone of the IDF in wartime, ready for a northern mission. Provisions were reduced, and reservists found their storage units in poor condition; much was missing, and there were also failures of supply during the fighting, including food and water. Above all, the extent of call-ups for reservist training fell in recent years-again, largely for budgetary and larger economic reasons (not to disrupt the work of highly productive men in key industries)-well below the minimal levels necessary to enable units to fight coherently once mobilized. 2. Operations: Paradoxically, what feeds the anger of the reservists-and the bereaved parents-who are now calling for Olmert and Peretz to go is not that their units were sent into harm's way, but that they were not sent far enough. The people in the towns of the North, too, were willing to suffer, if only the outcome would be a decisive removal of Hezbollah from the areas from which they were being shelled. This did not happen. The soldiers who went in, and out, and in again; the huge reservist forces held, coiled and ready to spring, until it was almost too late, with plans changing by the day and hour-among them, bitter criticism is now directed at the vacillation, indecision, delay, and repeated reversal of orders, as well as at costly tactical mistakes (such as the manner in which infantry units were sent piecemeal into a town the size of Avishai Bravermann). Overall, there is a feeling among many experts that the basic operational framework in which the fighting was conducted-whether because too much was expected of the Air Force; or because of the political level's interest in bringing about a diplomatic solution, based on the Lebanese Army and a strong UN presence-violated some of the most basic rules of warfare, such as the full utilization of force and the need to maintain momentum in the battlefield. Any inquiry is bound to look, in this context, at the decisions made at the political level, by Olmert and Peretz; at the IDF headquarters level, by the chief of staff and his colleagues; as well as at the Northern Command and the divisional level (and there are strong indications of recurrent disconnects between the four levels). Such work is likely to focus on why the plan for a large, enveloping movement, which was used in an IDF exercise just a few months earlier, was ultimately rejected in favor of a much more tank-heavy grind through South Lebanon. 3. The "rear areas" (i.e., civilians under fire): Some government ministers have dismissed as "nonsense" the claim that the North was "neglected"-a claim made by, among many others, none other than the serving head of the Security Service (Shin Bet), Yuval Diskin. But the evidence-as the associate director of the AJC office in Jerusalem, Rabbi Ed Rettig, can attest from his personal experience traveling to the North to disseminate the Emergency Fund provisions-is overwhelming: The government was not there when needed, and the municipal authorities (strong and resilient in Haifa; much weaker, and in places, incompetent or worse, elsewhere) were largely left to fend for themselves. At the root of all this was a simple decision by Olmert's cabinet not to define this as a war, and thus, to avoid the implementation of extensive (and costly) measures required and provided for under the "Emergency Economy" system (MELAH, Mesheq L'Sh'at Herum , by its Hebrew acronym), which would have bound workers to their positions in the vital services, prevented any wartime dismissals, secured provisions for people in the shelters, and empowered the Rear Areas Command to extend safety measures to sensitive areas, such as the chemical stores in the industrial areas north of Haifa. Will all of this destroy Olmert? It is hard to tell, at this stage. A change in the murky pattern of cowardice by the international community; some robust action on the Syrian-Lebanese border to prevent resupply; a prolonged period of stability-all of these might restore some of his government's prestige in the public eye (albeit not enough, for the foreseeable future, for him to carry the country on to a renewed "Convergence" plan, or to peace talks offering concessions on the Golan). But once the commissions get under way, it may well be this very last point-the decision, probably for economic reasons, not to declare that the country was at war and to activate MELAH-that might raise the most profound questions as to his priorities, and those of our present political system as a whole.

Remove yourself from all mailings from American Jewish Committee.

Modify your profile.