EHUD OLMERT’S greatest sin in the eyes of the Israeli public is not that the war in Lebanon was “disproportionate”, but that he did not win it. Now that hostilities seem to be winding down, the debate over the conduct of one of the most unsuccessful military campaigns in the history of the Jewish state has begun with a vengeance. And it could bring about the demise of the Prime Minister and the new, centrist, Kadima party that he led to victory in the election in March.
There is a word in Hebrew for such a reversal: mechdal. It means something along the lines of “culpable failure resulting from inadequate preparation and inaction”. It was last in common currency after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when the Israeli political and military leadership failed to anticipate the attack by two Arab armies.
The initial reverses of 1973 were so traumatic that they triggered a chain of protests. These eventually dethroned the Labour Party, which had dominated politics for three decades, and paved the way for the ascendancy of Likud.
But whatever the difficulties of the opening days of the 1973 war, by its end the Israelis could boast significant battlefield successes, such as crossing the Suez Canal. Even in Lebanon in 1982, whatever the costs to Israel’s reputation abroad, it could accurately assert that the Palestine Liberation Organisation had been ejected from its northern neighbour.
Despite Hezbollah’s (replenishable) losses, no such consolation is possible this time. Contrary to what Mr Olmert told the Knesset on Monday, Hezbollah continues to be state within a state — if not more powerful than the Lebanese Government itself. Although he had vowed to eliminate the Hezbollah leadership, Israel did not “get” Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. That was largely because he spent much of the war in Damascus. Indeed, Mr Olmert conspicuously did not target the two greatest sponsors of Hezbollah terrorism in this conflict — Syria and Iran.
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The rocket attacks on northern Israel increased, rather than diminished, as the ceasefire approached. There are anything between a quarter and half a million displaced Israelis within a nation of six million. Another million-plus have had to spend many days in shelters.
Even the original casus belli — the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah — has not yielded their release. And as Israeli reservists return home, expect a rash of horror stories about inadequate equipment and training because of budget cuts in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Nor did the military fully take on board Hezbollah’s style of asymmetric warfare that brought to the fore the “suicide fighter” rather than the “suicide bomber”. In the first 20 days of war, the Israelis took hardly any prisoners.
No wonder that a Dialog poll for the left-wing daily newspaper, Haaretz, at the end of last week found that only 20 per cent of Israelis thought that the IDF were winning — and this in a war supported at the outset by the entire mainstream political class. Mr Olmert’s 48 per cent approval rating was also surprisingly low for an incumbent in wartime.
But then Mr Olmert never wanted to be a war leader. As he observed in June last year: “We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies, we want that we will be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies.” If that last goal could not be achieved by negotiation, then he would act unilaterally. Israel would hunker down and lead a normal Western life from behind the security fence — safe in the knowledge that the IDF were so strong that anybody still daring to shoot at the Jewish state would receive a thrashing.
The Lebanon campaign has dramatically undermined such thinking. In the midst of it, Mr Olmert injudiciously revealed that a successful operation there would make it easier to evacuate more territory. He was forced to retract, and key figures in the Kadima Knesset caucus have made it clear that further unilateral withdrawals are unacceptable. Kadima could fall apart as quickly as it coalesced.
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Faced with public anger, some of those who came to Kadima from Likud, such as Shaul Mofaz, the former Defence Minister, may revert to their previous allegiances. Expect also major ructions inside Labour, Kadima’s main coalition partner.
With so much of the political class discredited, to whom might a disenchanted Israel turn? Despite the disappointment with the IDF leadership — amplified by the revelation that Dan Halutz, the chief of staff, took time out to sell his stocks only hours after he knew that the soldiers had been kidnapped — the forces remain the most revered institution in society. In the public mind, one of the few figures to avoid the taint of in- competence and corruption is Moshe Yaalon, the last chief of staff. He is credited with playing a key role in dramatically reducing the number of Palestinian suicide attacks, showing that asymmetric warfare can be fought successfully.
General Yaalon, a Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has so far been almost as cryptic about his intentions as General Eisenhower was before being drafted to run for the US presidency in 1952. If he wins power, it will be by constitutional means rather than by a military coup — unlike almost everywhere else in the Middle East. But in the current climate in Europe, don’t expect anyone to give the Israeli political system much credit for that.
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Dean Godson is research director of Policy Exchange