Israel's Woes: Something's Gotta Give

The Winograd Commission's report on Israel's war with Hezbollah which took place in Lebanon last summer is very critical of the Israeli government, but not in the way the leftist MSM or other anti-Israel foes would be.  The report instead comes down hard on Israel's lack of preparedness for war in the face of the many acts of war perpetuated on it by its enemies.  Jeff Jacoby writes:

The commission blasts Olmert for making rash and uninformed decisions, and pronounces him guilty of "a serious failure in exercising judgment, responsibility, and prudence." It is equally critical of the inept defense minister, Amir Peretz, whose incompetence crippled Israel's ability to defend itself from Hezbollah's attacks, and of former military chief of staff Dan Halutz, who never warned his clueless superiors that the armed forces were unprepared for a ground offensive in southern Lebanon.

The immediate trigger for the war was Hezbollah's July 12 incursion across the Lebanon-Israel border, in which three soldiers were killed and two others kidnapped. But Hezbollah had been openly preparing for war for six years, ever since Israel's unilateral retreat from southern Lebanon in May 2000. Making no attempt to disguise its intentions, Hezbollah swept into the territory Israel had abandoned, creating a network of fortified bunkers and launch sites and deploying thousands of missiles and rockets along the border. All the while Israel looked on, doing nothing about the mounting threat.

"Every alarm bell should have been ringing," Jerusalem Post editor David Horovitz writes. "But many of the warning systems had, literally or figuratively, long since been disconnected."

How could Israel have been so complacent? What could have accounted for such lethargy in the face of a deadly menace that was growing more dangerous by the day?

The answer, says the Winograd Commission, is that too many of "the political and military elites in Israel have reached the conclusion that Israel is beyond the era of wars." Unlike their forbears, who understood that the Jewish state would never have peace until its enemies decided to lay down their arms, today's Israeli leadership imagines that it can achieve peace by means of restraint and retreat.

"Since Israel did not intend to initiate a war," the report concludes, senior officials decided that Israel "did not need to be prepared for 'real' war." And that being the case, "there was also no urgent need to update in a systematic and sophisticated way Israel's overall security strategy and to consider how to mobilize . . . all its resources -- political, economic, social, military, spiritual, cultural, and scientific -- to address the totality of the challenges it faces."

Fed up with fighting, aching to live normally, Israelis lulled themselves into a stupor. They shook hands with Yasser Arafat and ran away from Lebanon and expelled the Jews from Gaza. They blamed themselves for their enemies' hatred and turned the other cheek to suicide bombings and Kassam rocket attacks. They tried to be Athens, one Israeli commentator wrote last year. But to survive in the Middle East, even Athens must sometimes act like Sparta.

"We are tired of fighting," Olmert moaned in a 2005 speech. "We are tired of defeating our enemies." But those who grow tired of defeating their enemies generally end up being defeated by them.

As America's beleaguered ally searches for new leadership, one voice worth heeding is that of Hebrew University game theorist and Nobel laureate Robert Aumann.

"We are like a mountain climber who gets caught in a snowstorm," Aumann said at this year's Herzliya Conference in January. "If he falls asleep, he will freeze to death. We are in terminal danger because we are tired. I will allow myself to say a few unpopular, unfashionable words: Our panicked lunging for peace is working against us. It brings us farther away from peace, and endangers our very existence."

With enemies like Hezbollah, weariness is a luxury Israel cannot afford.

Jacoby ends with a needed reminder - many in the US also live with blinders on:

And lest we forget, Hezbollah is our enemy too.

And in a related story - qassam rockets continue to rain down on Israel on an almost daily basis, and residents of the areas being targeted are questioning whether their government has forgotten them:

It's safe to assume that Sderot residents weren't surprised by the state comptroller's report Wednesday, regarding the failures of the government in dealing with Qassam attacks on Israel.

The increased rocket attacks on the city and the western Negev this past week have merely reinforced a prevalent opinion among regional residents that the IDF is not responding adequately to the attacks, as it did in the past.

"The state comptroller's report proves that the government abandoned the residents of Sderot and the region, and didn't prepare itself to deal with Qassams," said Alon Davidi, the chairman of Sderot's security staff.

"The worst part is that the IDF is asking to fix the problem and address the Qassam rockets with a ground operation in Gaza, but the government rejects the military recommendation and perpetuates its horrible mistake of abandoning residents under rocket threat."

Providing safety for its people should be the number one task of a government.  There's nothing more important.

The Sderot municipality released a statement in response to the report, stating "the lack of IDF preparation regarding Qassams is nothing compared to the complete lack of action by the government of (Prime Minister) Ehud Olmert and (Defense Minister) Amir Peretz, who were joined this past week by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

"Our amazement only grew after the direct hit this week in which two houses in the city were damaged and the government's insistence on a policy of restraint and inaction. In our eyes (former Defense Minister) Shaul Mofaz is still the man of honor in our town for his tough responses to the rocket launchings until his replacement last spring."

Similar sentiments ring out from every neighborhood in the city, where it's always easy to find a family who has suffered from an attack.

Resident Zimru Yakobob, whose brother was killed in a Qassam attack, wrote a letter to the prime minister in response to the report, expressing his outrage at the lack of response from the government and the army.

"At last someone said what we already know, think and feel," Yakobob said of the state comptroller. "It doesn't matter if I'm the one who lost a brother or if I'm just any resident in the town, dealing with the daily rocket barrages.

"I remember former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who told us that if there would be rockets after the (2005) disengagement, we would hurt (the attackers) intensely.

"The Palestinians don't need to read the report. They're right in front of us, across the fence, laughing in our face. They see that we don't respond, don't do anything. Once, there was at least artillery…not silence, like there is now.

"I think there is no other sovereign nation in the world where rocket attacks could continue for six years non-stop, without anyone doing anything. This is exactly what the comptroller is saying – how does a strong nation allow something like this to happen?"

A direct rocket hit on two 14-year-old boys, Amir Basad and Matan Cohen, five months ago was especially traumatic for the community. Cohen was severely injured and Basad sustained critical wounds requiring immediate surgery. He only recently returned home, after four and a half months of intense physical therapy.

"I heard the report and it wasn't news to me. You need to be here to understand," said Bruria Basad, Amir's mother. "People act as if things relate only to us in Sderot, but they should affect everyone. I want a Knesset member or minister to come live here for just a couple of days in order to feel what we're going through."

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