www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001262.html
I interviewed two members of Israel's Peace Now who stayed on a kibbutz just a few kilometers south of the border under Katyusha fire attack. Not wanting to give space only to the Israeli left, I sought out someone who could give me a different point of view, someone who was not an officer or spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces, someone who could speak his or her own mind freely without having to answer to the government or the army.
JPG If anyone would be able to provide a clear and thoughtful defense of Israel's most recent war in Lebanon, it should be him. The Hezbollah War, or whatever it ought to be called, is one of the least popular wars in Israel's history. We met at Yad Vashem and he gave me the best insider's tour of the museum I could ever have hoped for. Afterward we sat down in the restaurant to talk about his book and the recently concluded hostilities. If it's not a defense of all of Israel's wars, which ones are not...
Lebanon Two wasn't in my book, and that was a stupid one. it wasn't a full-fledged war, but it was pretty close to it. From the perspective of the people living up north it was a full-fledged war. So we stumbled into what was an almost full-fledged war with absolutely no prior strategy. If you look - and you don't have to go back far, we had an election here in March - you can go back and look at the election campaign, it was all of six months ago, and you will not find Lebanon mentioned once. Those of us who are educated enough to follow the newspaper and to remember what is says knew that Hezbollah was building this tremendous armory of weapons that were aimed at us. We put it in the way back of our minds, didn't deal with it, and we went to war with them with a prior notice of about 32 seconds. The second one was that over the next two days Olmert defined for us what the goals were. And they were goals that we could definitely agree with, but they were not realistic. far reaching goals, he then did nothing to make them happen. The Germans, the Czechs, and the Poles were sort of backing us. And most of the West was saying okay, well, you know, let's pretend we don't like it, but if you kill the Hezbollah that's fine. Killing Lebanese civilians for no obvious reason that anybody could see. I always say if you're ever in the mood for some real good hardcore criticism of Israel... the best and almost only good place to go, you go to Ha'aretz. They are better at it than anybody else because they know what they're talking about. There was a guy in Ha'aretz, I don't remember who it was, about the second week of the war, demonstrated in a factual tone of voice that the moral criteria which we were fighting this war were lower than the war with the Palestinians. The IDF finds a terrorist holed up in a building in Nablus. at the end of the day they will have killed the guy or arrested him. But they will not do so as long as civilians are in that building. One civilian and one terrorist and we will figure out a way of getting rid of the civilian before we kill the terrorist. By the third day it was obvious that we had changed our own rules. But we were not abiding by the rules that we use fifty miles south. It's a lot easier for them to have these rules inside Nablus - isn't it?
And the IDF has no ground control over that place, ever. So how could the IDF have those rules of engagement all the way up there? Lozowick: I don't know the numbers, and I don't know if anybody does know the numbers, but I don't even know the number of the dead civilians up in the dahiyeh. But as far as we know - and we could be wrong here - the populace of the dahiyeh had at least a twelve-hour warning that this was going to happen and at least most of them weren't there. There must have been tens of thousands of people living in the dahiyeh. MJT: Yeah, it's not the size of Tel Aviv, but the size of Ramallah maybe. Now, clearly it's easier to do this in Nablus than in the dahiyeh, and I think from the perspective of the Israelis that a certain amount of collateral damage was inevitable. there's no justification for that that any of us can see. The army was saying "it will take us ten days and we'll kill off Hezbollah." So had we killed off Hezbollah and had 600 dead Lebanese civilians, nobody would have been happy about it, but maybe you say, okay, maybe there's no choice. The question would have been raised after the war, not during the war, and it would have been raised in any case, but maybe we would have said there was no choice. But by the second week of the war the air force clearly wasn't going to beat the Hezbollah. And then in the third week of the war, and the world is getting more and more impatient with us, the goodwill that had been there was being dissipated. We finally started going in there with totally the wrong forces. MJT: If I quote you saying all this stuff, I can already see what's going to be said about what you're saying. I've already said a lot of this myself and was dismissed by the right. MJT: You're saying a lot of what the Peace Now guys said. Some readers of my blog told me I need to get out of the left-wing bubble. I'm saying that although the war was not planned and certainly was not discussed, way over 90 percent of the Israelis in those first days thought it was justified. And it was justified even if we were killing some Lebanese civilians because there's no way you can get at Hezbollah without also getting people that Hezbollah is using as shields. I'm about as close to the Israeli consensus as anybody can be. I'm more critical than mainstream Israelis at the moment because of the Lebanese civilians. People can say "Michael, you're quoting a lefty on that one." And that is, I'm not saying that the war shouldn't have been carried forward. We should have done it with as much force as we could muster. And we should have killed every single Hezbollah fighter in Southern Lebanon. I'm not saying it's a stupid war because it couldn't have been won. Or anyway it could have been fought on a level where it would have been obvious to everybody that although Nasrallah on the last day of the war could have been claiming victory it would have been clear to everybody that he's just talking through his hat. Having said that, I think that you can quote me as much as you want because this is what most Israelis are saying. MJT: It's just funny because I was told by several people to get out of the left-wing bubble. And I'm talking to you, and you're out of the left-wing bubble, and it sounds the same. MJT: I hate to stick labels on you, I'm just trying to figure out what the Israeli political spectrum is. Lozowick: We're in one of those very rare cases right now where there is a consensus. There was a consensus at the beginning of the war that stretched deep into the left-wing bubble. It's a stupid war because it caused tremendous damage without bringing anything. MJT: But is there a consensus for why it was a stupid war? Or do you have a left-wing critique, a centrist critique, and a right-wing critique? Because it seems to me like there are some people who are upset that it was stopped early, that it should have been more ruthless. And I've heard others say it was too much, it was over the top. Lozowick: You have to remember where Olmert is coming from. And we dare not march large forces into Lebanon because our own populace won't allow it. And the air force says we can do it from the air, so let's do it that way. the Israelis are a very educated public when it comes to waging war. We know what we're talking about on a personal level and on a national level. It was pretty clear to all of us by the end of the first week that this was not going to work because there were going to have to be ground forces. I think that a sizeable proportion of the Israelis would have been willing or even eager to have a real invasion of Southern Lebanon in the second week. Olmert, I think, didn't realize that and didn't follow that. Now, by the fourth week we get people like David Grossman who published a quarter-page ad in the newspaper who said this is a just war. And then a week later was saying it's time to stop the war. His r...
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