Xymphora
It must be frightening to be an Israeli now. The class bully comes back from summer vacation and finds that all the little kids he used to beat up are now bigger than he is. Although we’ll never read it in the mainstream press, and in fact are seeing a small tsunami of articles on ‘making Aliyah’, I’m sure there is a big net emigration from Israel, as it suddenly has become apparent that he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword (the ‘demographic problem’ is about to become much worse). Instead of using the lessons learned in Lebanon to lead to an interest in negotiation, the Israeli right is using the defeat as a prod to push for more violence. Soon, Netanyahu will be back in power, and the almost hopeless situation will become completely hopeless.
By the way, the test of good faith in reading anything on this issue is whether an attempt is made to claim that the Israeli attack on Lebanese civilians was an act of self-defense. If you see even a hint of ‘self-defense’, the writer is incapable of understanding that it is not acceptable to slaughter civilians and destroy an entire country in retaliation for the capture of two soldiers, particularly when:
- The soldiers were almost certainly captured in Lebanon;
- There have recently been hundreds of incidents along the border, almost all instigated by Israel, and none of which led to military escalation;
- Hezbollah captured the soldiers in order to exchange them for Lebanese held illegally by Israel;
- the Israeli attack on Lebanon had been planned for at least a year before the Israeli soldiers were captured.
There is no obvious direct military threat to Israel’s existence. Hezbollah’s victory – and it was a clear victory, with the small number of Hezbollah military funerals leading to the conclusion that the death ratio was probably well over two-to-one in favor of Hezbollah – was completely defensive. Nevertheless, the entire equation of Israel’s existence has always been based on the idea that no Arab could defeat an IDF operation. That delusion has been shattered. The problem was both at the level of the highest military and political planners, and at the level of the IDF, and at the level of the Israeli soldiers.
The planners seemed to think that extensive intentional bombing of civilians would cause the Lebanese to blame Hezbollah for their problems, thus removing the civilian support for Hezbollah, thus leading to an easy Israeli military victory. Instead, as any fool could tell you would happen, Lebanese civilian opinion went entirely against the people dropping the bombs, and entirely towards the only group in the country with the ability to defend the Lebanese people. The Israelis based their analysis on the NATO success at bombing Serbian civilians, missing the point that Serbia had a functioning government in charge of the whole country which cared about the status of its civilian population. NATO blackmailed the central Serbian government into capitulating on the basis that it would keep slaughtering civilians until the government gave up. Since the central Lebanese government had no control over Hezbollah, the bombing plan was flawed from the outset, and just served to strengthen Hezbollah. Once again, the dream of military planners, that a war can be won from the air, has been proven to be wrong.
The Israelis are noticing that the IDF has become sloppy and ineffective, largely based on the fact that it has been exclusively employed as a police unit in charge of brutalizing Palestinian civilians. Israeli soldiers, used to showing force to groups of cowering Palestinian grandmothers, arrogantly stood around in Lebanese mountain passes, allowing Hezbollah to take them out in groups using anti-tank weapons. Even worse, the entire fighting ability of the IDF, both tactics and military hardware, has been formed around battling Palestinian small arms fire in urban settings on relatively flat ground. In the hills of Lebanon, facing well trained soldiers with anti-tank weapons, the Israelis were sitting ducks. A fighting unit geared around an ability to fire tank shells into groups of Palestinian schoolchildren was no match for Hezbollah. There is some karma in this: a history of brutalizing Palestinian civilians has made the IDF ineffective as a fighting force against real soldiers.
The final problem – and mentioning this is the ultimate taboo – is with the soldiers themselves. Israelis have always fought valiantly on the theory that the Jewish people had their backs against the wall and that the fight to preserve the Jewish people from anti-Semitic annihilation was just. Sending conscripts – many of them born in the Soviet Union and dragged by their phony-Jew parents to Israel as part of the ongoing Israeli scam to increase its non-Arab population, and with no interest in Israel or Jewish history or culture – who correctly understand that there is no real ‘existential threat’ to Israel, to risk their lives so the settlers can have swimming pools full of stolen water, isn’t quite the same thing. In fact, it was the Hezbollah soldiers who benefited from the fact that they knew their fight to defend their families and their country was just. We are now seeing the lies that form the basis of racist Israeli statehood finally coming home to roost.
