Are the Israel Defense Forces Finally Ready for the Next Lebanon War?

UNCLASSIFIED

While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to threaten Iran, another—perhaps more urgent—challenge has developed: the implications of the Syrian civil war and surrounding regional chaos on Israel’s security. The Arab Spring, with its ongoing creation of failed states on Israel’s borders, has become a major factor in Israel’s strategic environment. Since the beginning of this year, the Israeli Air Force has struckthree times in Syria, hitting convoys and stockpiles of modern weapons systems before they were transferred to Hezbollah. The historical event that preoccupies Israeli military planners and commentators today is not the attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor, or the tank battles of the Yom Kippur War, whose 40th anniversary will be commemorated this year, but the 2006 war in Lebanon, which showed Israel to be markedly unprepared for the kinds of future wars it is likely to wage.

It is strange, in a way, that the 2006 Lebanese war left a much more visible mark on the Israeli psyche than that terrible period of the Second Intifada, when more than 1,100 Israeli civilians and soldiers died within five years. Though the death toll of the Lebanon war has been much smaller (165 on the Israeli side), it remains a national trauma, nearly seven years later—a small Yom Kippur War, despite the absence of any serious military threat to the army or to the country. The number of books published about each event could serve as a good illustration. During the last decade, only three books were written by Israelis about the Intifada. More than 10 books were published about Lebanon, including soldiers’ diaries and novels. (The 1973 war, by the way, leads the list: Around five new books about the war were published every year in the last decade. In this anniversary year, more than 10 new books are expected.)

What’s clear is that the trauma is related to Israelis’ disappointment with the IDF’s stunningly poor performance. About a year before the Lebanon war broke out, the Second Intifada had more or less ended, if not with a decisive victory against Palestinian terrorism than at least with a general sense that the Israeli public had stood up to the challenge. It might have been our very unique version of that remarkable British stiff upper lip—which naturally involved much more kvetching. But when it was finally over, West Bank Palestinians seemed less interested in launching suicide bomb attacks, and calm returned to the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

But then, suddenly, in July 2006, panic returned. Not only did Hezbollah surprise the IDF by killing eight soldiers and hijacking the bodies of two others across the Lebanese border, but the Shiite organization continued to shoot thousands of rockets at the Northern part of Israel for 34 days. The IDF seemed helpless in its attempts to stop the bombardments. Israel tried bombing areas from which Hezbollah launched short-range rockets—and failed. It bombed some Lebanese infrastructure (bridges, roads, a petrol reservoir at the Beirut airport)—and Hezbollah didn’t stop. It then went for limited military ground incursions—nothing happened. The last attempt occurred during the final 60 hours—a wider ground maneuver, but Hezbollah kept on shooting rockets until the ceasefire was announced.

The political leadership did not perform any better. The country’s new Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, had been caught far away from his natural element. The former mayor of Jerusalem, called in to fill Ariel Sharon’s huge shoes just six months after Sharon suffered a stroke, hadn’t shown any particular interest in security issues before. But even Olmert knew more about Israel’s strategic environment than his choice for defense minister, former union leader Amir Peretz. I distinctly recall coming home after meeting with Peretz, a week into his new job, suspecting that I knew more about the IDF than the new minister did—a feeling that I was not used to and that frankly alarmed me.

Peretz’s abilities did not improve over time. Both generals and government colleagues saw his performance in the Defense Ministry as a joke. (One was reminded of David Halberstam’s remark about Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War: “He was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool.”) Unfortunately, the IDF Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, the last member of a bizarre triumvirate that included Olmert and Peretz, did not improve the general outcome. Halutz, a famed fighter pilot, had been handpicked for the job by Sharon. When ministers and advisers warned Sharon of the new chief’s absolute lack of experience handling ground wars, the elderly prime minister answered: “But I’ll be there.”

Sharon, it turned out, was wrong. During the war, Halutz spent three days in medical treatment for a mysterious disorder, later reported to have been psychosomatic. A day after the war ended, the Israeli newspaper Maariv revealed that the IDF’s No. 1 officer had sold $30,000 worth of stocks, a few hours after the soldiers were kidnapped. Halutz resigned five months later, and Peretz followed him in May 2007. Only Olmert remained in office until early 2009, when a series of corruption scandals forced him to retire. But the Israeli public had lost its faith in Olmert much earlier. Most public opinion polls constantly showed that less than 10 percent of the voters believed that he was fit to remain in office after the war.

Now there is a new trend among Israeli journalists and, even more so among politicians and officers who were involved in crucial decisions during the war, to describe the 2006 Lebanese war in retrospect as a mixed blessing.