Last update - 00:00 01/02/2008
Behind the Lines / A victory on points
By Ehud Asheri
"The cabinet decision [to launch the ground operation] was almost inevitable, giving the Israeli government necessary military and political flexibility ... The goals of the ground operation were legitimate ... There was no failure in that decision, despite its limited achievements and its painful costs... Even if both the prime minister and the defense minister took into account political and public concerns ... we believe that they both acted out of a strong and sincere perception of what they thought at the time was Israel's interest" - From the summary of the Winograd Committee's final report
In the end, the Winograd Committee did not come up with a body, and it is going to pay mightily for that. As far as the stunned protest camp is concerned, the committee's members now share in the failure of the war, no less. "This is a blundering committee that examined a blunder," one of the bereaved parents stated on Wednesday. "It was born in sin and its members did not know what they were getting into," fumed Ofer Shelah, one of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's most vociferous critics. Their response is understandable: The final report is, to their taste, irresolute - but only because the war was, too.
The committee's members refused to enter the bloody political arena that has existed here for the past year. They refused to yield to the rules of mud-wrestling that dictated the media campaign over the future of the prime minister. That is not the committee's style and not its way of speaking. It is not a ratings-hungry newspaper editorial board. Instead, it chose to assume the role of the responsible adult, the one who breaks up the brawl, scolds the rampaging children and puts everything into its proper proportions.
Olmert's opponents centered their media campaign around the issue of his "personal responsibility" for the failings of the war (particularly the late ground operation) and relied on the Winograd Committee to support their approach unequivocally. But the committee, for a wide variety of reasons, did not address the essence of "personal responsibility" and returned that highly charged issue to the public arena. The committee signaled to the public that the real problems are systemic and extend deep down into the way by which Israelis and their institutions comport themselves. Anyone who wanted a "formative moment," in terms of a change of norms, got it, but in reverse. The committee is not engaged in dirty political battles; instead, it has relegated the problem to its proper venue: the judgment of the public and the media.
Olmert could not have wished for a better result. The media arena is his natural stomping ground. Under impossible opening conditions and in the face of sweeping popular sentiment against his continuation in office, he did the maximum possible to create centers of sympathy in the central media outlets and to reach Judgment Day equipped with the support of the chief molders of public opinion.
When retired judge Eliyahu Winograd opened his remarks on Wednesday, Olmert could assume that the two most important media outlets in the country - Channel 2 and the mass-circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth - would stand by him. That was their inclination all along, not least because of his large investment in both of them (including an exclusive interview granted to Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer of Yedioth after the Annapolis conference, and, on Channel 2, an historic encounter with the comic Eli Yatzpan, cooperation with the investigative program "Fact," and a rare appearance by his wife with Dana Weiss).
Olmert's situation is more complex in the other media outlets. He has lost his traditional bastion of support in the other mass-circulation paper, Maariv, in the wake of the departure of editor-in-chief Amnon Dankner; Haaretz displayed a pluralistic approach, and its commentators are split between the two camps; and Channel 10 has emerged a tough adversary, mainly because of the militant attitude of its commentator and Friday evening anchor Ofer Shelah, who has made Olmert's ouster a personal project both on television and in Maariv, where he has a weekly column.
The media battle was saturated with copious spinning from both sides, but basically focused on a struggle between two positions of principle. The Olmert camp emphasized the future: The prime minister internalized the lessons of the war and has become the bearer of the standard of conciliation with the Palestinians; he must remain in office in order to advance the peace process. The other camp emphasized the past: The prime minister bears personal responsibility for the failings of the war, and he can be held to it only by his removal from the political arena. The former pointed to Olmert's successful performance in the secret operation in Syria and his balanced policy toward Hamas in Gaza. The latter preferred to place the end-of-war ground operation at the center of the debate, as the salient symbol of Olmert's blunders.
If at the outset it seemed as though the "peace spin" was dominating media coverage and pointing the way to the prime minister's political survival, as the date for the publication of the Winograd Committee report loomed, it became apparent that the central media issue was the reasonableness of the decision to launch the ground operation. The reservists and the bereaved families now surely regret having focused on that subject, which they did on the assumption that it would seal Olmert's fate. The prime minister's aides did not take fright. They knew first-hand the position of the committee members on this subject, and responded by leaking complimentary remarks made by them about Olmert's performance during the final military operation.
This confrontation generated a piquant journalistic offshoot: It fomented a head-on clash, rare in its aggressive style, between Yedioth and Maariv, which well exemplifies the division of roles between the two papers with respect to Olmert. It all started with a Maariv headline last Friday according to which Gabi Ashkenazi, the present chief of staff but at the time of the war director general of the Defense Ministry, tried to block the ground move. Senior correspondent Ben Caspit described at length how Ashkenazi failed in his effort to persuade the leadership to abandon the operation, at one stage in a conference call with the deputy chief of staff, Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, and the IDF attache in Washington, Major General Dan Harel. From the point of view of Maariv, this was an expose that merited the front page and also undermined Olmert's prospects of survival. From Olmert's point of view, it was a media catastrophe at the worst possible time.
On Sunday of this week, Yedioth Ahronoth came to Olmert's rescue. In a page 2 report, the paper stated: "The IDF Spokesperson vehemently denied the content of last Friday's Maariv headline, to the effect that the [present] chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, tried, in his capacity as director general of the Defense Ministry, to stop the final operation of the Second Lebanon War." The report added that, contrary to the Maariv story, no three-way conference call had ever taken place between Ashkenazi, Kaplinsky and Harel. A senior figure in the IDF was quoted as saying: "If the Maariv correspondent wants to be the mouthpiece of the chief of staff, he should at least be accurate with his facts."
The reaction by Maariv came the next day: "In the wake of the crass assertions by Yedioth Ahronoth yesterday, it needs to be made clear that the IDF Spokesperson never denied the Maariv headline ... Yedioth chose to twist the IDF Spokesperson's statement in a particularly gross way, alleging in the report's headline that 'Ashkenazi did not intervene in the decision,' even though the IDF Spokesperson never denied Ashkenazi's actual effort to block the operation."
This was not the first time that the media battle for and against Olmert slid into personal attacks. For example, on the Friday-evening weekly newsmagazine of Channel 10, Ofer Shelah lashed out at Nahum Barnea for making a distinction regarding how the 33 soldiers were killed in the final 60 hours of the war, after the United Nations passed a cease-fire resolution (according to Barnea, 19 of the soldiers were in the area before the cease-fire, whereas only 14 entered after it). Shelah argued that this is an artificial, tendentious division, which sought to reduce the scale of Olmert's failure. Barnea did not respond.
Olmert's public struggle has not ended, but as of Wednesday evening it is being waged under conditions that are far more convenient for the prime minister. The report's ambivalent wording and the way it notes the failings along with the achievements supply ammunition to both camps. But it does not contain enough condemnations to create a critical mass of public protest that will push Olmert's coalition partners out. With its conclusions about the ground operation, it is far easier to present the report as an acquittal rather than a conviction, and the responses of the reservists and the bereaved parents speak for themselves ("a blundering committee that is examining a blunder").
If Olmert can demonstrate that his peace policy is not just another ploy, he will make it very difficult for the Labor Party to yield to the resignation pressures; if he can demonstrate that his new social sensitivity is not another trick, he can count on the support, at least for the time being, of Shas and the Pensioners' party. Under these circumstances, there is no reason for him not to continue in office for many months to come.