Last update - 00:00 31/01/2008
Every citizen's responsibility
By Israel Harel
The Winograd Committee, to the chagrin of many, did not dispatch Ehud Olmert to the political desert, and perhaps that is a good thing. In so doing, it has committed a supremely educational act: Instead of requiring Olmert to resign, it has required us, the public, to stop whining and waiting for others, like the committee, to do our job for us. The time has come, Winograd said, to no longer place all the responsibility, and in almost all spheres of life, on the government, the army, the courts and other branches of government. The concept in principle that the public, and not the committee, will decide where conclusions should be drawn about continued service following the harsh findings ("The main responsibility is on the prime minister" as stated by the partial report, which is inseparable from the final report) is educational and reasonable.
In any case, this concept did not arise out of extraneous considerations, as various commentators said yesterday. The partial report, which placed "ministerial and personal responsibility" on Ehud Olmert, will not change. And the jury - we - must now sequester ourselves and decide whether we want the prime minister, together with his colleagues who failed, to continue as our leader, or whether they should all resign.
The public, at least as revealed by continuous opinion polls since the war, has said its piece: Olmert is to blame and the public has no faith in him. But that self-same public is waiting for someone like the Winograd Committee to take its irons out of the fire. Because in general, the public has ceased taking responsibility, and not only since the war. It places it on the government and the army.
But the government and the army are a reflection of the public that is shirking its responsibility. Many who voted for the reckless and irresponsible Olmert would now like to see him go. After the long years he has been involved in politics and through endless investigations of which he has been the focus, they could have recognized his rashness. What did they think? That because he became prime minister he would suddenly undergo a personality transplant? How did they give their trust to a person who for many years was one of the most fluent spokespeople of the right, and suddenly with the same fluency, he became the executor, as one pundit had it yesterday, of the policies of Uri Avnery? Those who voted for him and did not see all these essential flaws that should disqualify a person from public service, certainly from the office of prime minister, should not now complain about the Winograd Committee.
The public cannot claim to be blameless, perhaps even more so with regard to the role of the Israel Defense Forces. Dan Halutz was not the only one who determined that the Israel Air Force would do most of the work. It was the public - mainly the public - that determined, much earlier than this war, that soldiers should not be put at risk in ground operations. Halutz was operating according to the norms dictated to him. Former chief of staff Shaul Mofaz ordered that Madhat Yusuf not be extracted from Joseph's Tomb for fear of incurring casualties. The same chief of staff, together with GOC Central Command Yitzhak Eitan and division commander Benny Gantz, abandoned for some 10 hours a group of hikers that had been attacked on Mount Ebal, although they had suffered a casualty and injured members, including small children. They acted this way because that is what we citizens demanded of them: Do not endanger our "children" - the soldiers.
Those citizens also pressured the government to release many hundreds of terrorists - everyone knew that a large number of them would return to their evil ways - in exchange for a few soldiers or bodies of soldiers. And when disasters happened during training, or special operations, such as the naval commando unit disaster, there is immediate pressure for cutting off the heads of IDF brass. The commanders have internalized these moods and have transformed them, in opposition to the basic interests of the state and the spirit that should be present in the army, into norms. Victory is not the principle to these commanders, but rather their survival, their ability not to get entangled in military police investigations or be removed from their post. But in Lebanon, containment was not enough. There, when Hezbollah bombarded the North with thousands of Katyushas, they had to fight. And fighting means taking the risk of losses. True, the brass, like the government, was confused, unfocused, not determined and did not seek to engage the enemy, but it reached that point to a great extent because of what civilians dictated to it for quite a few years.
That is the main lesson of the Second Lebanon War and these conclusions, which are much more important than whether Olmert will survive or not, have been thrust at us by the Winograd Committee. If we continue to deal with the taking of responsibility by Olmert, the government and the army - as important as these matters are in themselves - and thus relieve ourselves of responsibility, it will mean that we did not learn, in national terms, the real lessons of the war.