IRIS Blog

As someone who fought in the 1948 War of Independence, among other conflicts, I view the reservists' protest against the Lebanon fiasco as having the potential of initiating a process that could contribute to a politically, economically and socially healthier Israel.

If that happens Lebanon II will be remembered as our "second war of independence." It will become a true war of liberation from a corrupting system which threatens our future existence.

First, the irresponsible politicians who started the war without foresight or adequate preparation must be held accountable. The disastrous results of their confusing hesitations, motivated by political considerations, are so obvious that those at fault ought to go even before any commission formally defines their culpability.

The fact that their bungling caused so many unnecessary casualties, that they failed to realize any of their declared war aims - dismantling Hezbollah, removing the rocket threat to the North and returning our captive soldiers - is reason enough to have them go.

So, too, is the grave damage they caused to Israel's deterrence capacity and to its standing in the US and the Muslim world. Their inept and hesitant management of the war prevented the powerful Israeli army from winning a decisive victory over a 15,000-man guerrilla army.

They squandered the backing that the US president gave them (at high political cost). They boosted the morale of our Muslim enemies. These reasons alone justify sending them home.

But above all they must go because they have lost the confidence of the people.

In an open letter published on August 20, soldiers and officers of Brigade 551 wrote that the military and political leadership's conduct of the fighting in Lebanon made them "feel as if someone had spit in our faces." Ironically, three days earlier, someone really did spit in their faces: the honorable Judge of the Haifa District Court, who authored an August 17 ruling barring Haifa University from using army service as one of its criteria for allocating dorm rooms.

Like most Israeli universities, Haifa has fewer dorm rooms than students, so it allocates the rooms via a point system. Students receive points for various factors: academic achievement, how far from the university they live, their financial situation, physical disabilities, family size, military or civilian national service, and more. The students with the highest totals get the dorms.

Three Arab students and Adalah, an Arab advocacy organization, sued the university over these criteria, arguing that including national service on the list discriminates against Arab students, who usually eschew such service.

The university responded that it was not, heaven forbid, trying to express gratitude or appreciation for those who serve; it was merely trying to compensate for a cold economic fact: People who spend two to three years in unpaid national service are at a financial disadvantage compared to people who could have spent those years working and saving money.

True, the law grants demobilized soldiers certain economic benefits, but those benefits are worth less than even a minimum-wage job would pay over an equivalent period. Thus an 18-year-old Arab high school graduate and a 21-year old ex-soldier with identical parental incomes are not financially equal; the ex-soldier is economically worse off.

Leshem, however, dismissed this argument. If the point of the service criterion is economic, he said, then it should not exist, because service has no inherent connection to financial need. The lost years of earning - i.e. the fact that the 18-year-old Arab and the 21-year-old ex-soldier are not financially equivalent - do not concern him; what does concern him is that even well-off students receive points for military service, thereby, in his eyes, contradicting the financial need criteria. Yet these applicants, too, have sacrificed three years of working life that can never be recovered.

Early in the recent Lebanon war, the blogosphere revealed the fabrication of images by Reuters, whose reputation is now in shreds among those dwindling numbers in the western mainstream media who still acknowledge there is such a thing as the truth. Since then, the nature and scale of the various frauds perpetrated by the media during that war put those doctored Reuters pictures into the shade. The western media are no longer merely producing questionable professional practices in reporting a war. They are now active participants in it ? and on the wrong side of history.

In short, much of the most incendiary media coverage of this war seems to have been either staged or fabricated. The big question is why the western media would perpetrate such institutionalised mendacity. Many ancillary reasons come to mind. There is the reliance upon corrupted news and picture agencies which employ Arab propagandists as stringers and cameramen. There is the herd mentality of the media which decides collectively what the story is. There is the journalists? fear for their personal safety if they report the truth about terrorist outfits. There is the difficulty of discovering the truth from undemocratic regimes and terrorist organisations. There is the language barrier; there is professional laziness; there is the naive inability to acknowledge the depths of human evil and depravity; there is the moral inversion of the left which believes that western truth-tellers automatically tell lies, while third world liars automatically tell the truth.

But the big answer is that the western media transmit the lies of Hezbollah because they want to believe them. And that?s because the Big Lie these media tell ? and have themselves been told ? about Israel and its place in history and in the world today has achieved the status of unchallengeable truth. The plain fact is that western journalists were sent to cover the war being waged against Israel from Lebanon as a war being waged by Israel against Lebanon. And that?s because that?s how editors think of the Middle East: that the whole ghastly mess is driven by Israel?s actions, and that therefore it is only Israel?s aggression which is the story to be covered. Thus history is inverted, half a century of Jewish victimization is erased from public consciousness, victims are turned into aggressors and genocidal mass murderers turned into victims, and ignorance and prejudice stalk England?s once staunch and stalwart land.

That?s why the fact that hundreds of thousands of refugees from the north of Israel fled to the shelter of strangers in the south; that within one third of Israel, those too poor or old or handicapped or disadvantaged to seek refuge elsewhere were forced to live in shelters for a month in great hardship; that the entire economy of northern Israel was effectively shut down for a month; that thousands of rockets were fired at northern Israel, hundreds every day, many times more than were daily fired at Britain during the Blitz ? that?s why none of this was reported in Britain (where as a result such facts, when now related, are received with open-mouthed astonishment) because journalists were told to ignore it all since that wasn?t the story their editors wanted. Israel?s victimisation simply was not, could not, be the story. The only story was Israel?s aggression. But that story is a Big Lie. So a host of lies were transmitted to support it.

The battle of Wadi Saluki will be remembered as one of the fiercest fights of the second Lebanon War.

It was during the push to the Litani River - a few hours before the UN-brokered cease-fire went into effect - that a column of Merkava tanks from Brigade 401 began crossing Wadi Saluki in the face of fierce Hezbollah resistance.

Friday night, August 11, was a turning point in the war. The cease-fire resolution was approved by the UN Security Council, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz ordered the IDF to take control of Lebanon up to the Litani River, the area from which Hezbollah had fired most of its Katyusha rockets.

Crossing the Saluki meant the troops and tanks had to climb a steep hill while exposed to attack from mountains on every side. Understanding the risk to his tanks, Brig.-Gen. Guy Zur, commander of Division 162, deployed Nahal Brigade infantrymen on the high ground outside Andouriya and Farun, to provide cover for the armored column below.

The wadi was described later by senior officers from Division 162 as the "gateway to the Litani." Crossing it was deemed to be the first, essential step in a sweep west across southern Lebanon.

Commanded by Col. Moti Kidor, Brigade 401's Merkava tanks had been waiting for the push to the Litani for close to a week. Twice, they had received the word to go, but when they began rolling, they were immediately told to stop. But on August 11, just before 5 p.m., orders came that were not canceled and at 8 p.m. the tanks began to move.

The Hezbollah fighters were waiting. Kidor's men had been standing by for nearly a week and the enemy knew that the only way west ran through the Saluki. At least 100 guerrillas had deployed with their most advanced anti-tank missile - the Russian-made Cornet.

By early morning on August 13, 24 hours before the cease-fire was scheduled to go into effect, the soldiers succeeded in crossing the wadi and climbing the hill, at a heavy price. Twelve soldiers were killed - eight tankists and four infantrymen. Some 80 Hezbollah gunmen were killed.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said on Wednesday that he was under the impression that kidnapped IDF soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were alive, but stopped short of confirming it.

His remarks during a press conference with Prime Minister Ehud olmert in Jerusalem came hours after US civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jackson, who met Syrian and Hamas leaders in Damascus, said that the soldiers were "alive and well."

Annan promised to do everything in his power to bring about the return of the kidnapped soldiers.

According to Annan, during his meeting with Lebanese leaders in Beirut, he demanded an immediate and unconditional release of the kidnapped troops held by Hizbullah. The UN chief commented that he was of the impression that they were serious about solving the problem.