Caught between the pride of combat and the public's criticism

When the prime minister, defense minister and chief of staff arrived on the northern border on Tuesday to visit Israel Defense Forces Division 91, they were shown a computer presentation of the battles the division fought in this summer's Lebanon war. According to someone who was present at the time, Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz's faces registered visible surprise: They could suddenly see the battles taking shape, bearing form and purpose.

They saw that, yes, there were failures, but there were also accomplishments, like the dozens of Hezbollah operatives who were killed, the bunkers that were bombed, the IDF units that took over the areas allocated to them, and the advancement - albeit interrupted and hesitant, in accordance with the mission changes dictated from above - toward defined goals.

As one of the symbols of the problematic war, Brigadier General Gal Hirsch, who heads Division 91, has been ridiculed and blamed for Hezbollah's abduction of two soldiers in his sector. Bereaved parents demanded his dismissal, and a brigade leader under his command was videotaped saying that the division commander had lost control.

But the more the inquiry committees probe the events of the war, the more complex the picture becomes. The anti-Hirsch sentiment - which has abated somewhat - stemmed in no small part from his personality; he is frequently described as both "brilliant" and "arrogant." Officers have recently been standing up to defend Hirsch during the many recent IDF meetings, saying that he is the only officer who commanded eight brigades in combat, the only one who fought from the beginning of the war to the end.

Now that the committees investigating the war have submitted interim findings, Hirsch is no longer bound by the orders of his superiors to keep silent and bear the brunt of the criticism.

"There's a gap that I have not managed to bridge," Hirsch told Olmert during his visit this week. "Between the feeling of the commanders in the combat units regarding what we accomplished and the public mood regarding the outcome of the war."

Several battalion commanders made similar comments. "When we were in Lebanon, we thought we were winning," one officer said. "When we left and watched TV, we discovered the opposite."

Hirsch has been torn between a burning desire to prove that he's right and a fear of getting dragged into a different kind of war - one of mutual recriminations. Uncharacteristically, he chose to remain silent. Chief of Staff Dan Halutz was reportedly close to dismissing Hirsch during the war. What was not reported was that while Hirsch was fighting Hezbollah, there were senior officers who put forth their candidacy as his replacement.

The investigations of the army divisions, which reveal hair-raising failures, lead to a possibly excessive focus on the leaders of those divisions. But Division 91's pre-war preparations - including countless exercises to get troops ready for a confrontation with Hezbollah - have reaped praise from Halutz. Hirsch had previously been labeled an alarmist for his frequent warnings that "there will be a war in the summer."

Lieutenant Colonel Hoshea Friedman Ben-Shalom, a deputy brigade commander in the Division 91 reserves, said "Hirsch was a terrible nuisance" who was a stickler for the smallest details - but that "in retrospect, he prepared us well for war."

Hezbollah's abduction of soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev is still being investigated by a committee headed by Major General (Res.) Doron Almog. In its defense, Division 91 points to the impossibility of completely preventing abductions while Israel accepts the presence of Hezbollah along the border and is constantly cutting down on its forces.

As soon as the ground war began, Hirsch began urging the General Staff to let him carry out more offensives. He believes the IDF's aggressiveness saved lives, although others say it led to unnecessary losses. Two battles, in which Israel sustained relatively heavy losses, garnered most of the attention: Maroun Ras and the first battle in Bint Jbail. Hirsch is accused of publicly taking pride in capturing Bint Jbail, although all he said on television was, "my forces are in control of Bint Jbail."

This statement was criticized when, 12 hours later, eight Golani soldiers were killed there . Hirsch does not see the battle as a failure because IDF troops killed dozens of Hezbollah operatives there. But it was his tone, more than the words themselves, that people remember.

All in all, it appears that Hirsch's struggle for his good name is belated. The way things look now, his standing - in the IDF and in the public eye - has been damaged enough that it will be hard for Hirsch to recover.

	Brig. Gen. Gal Hirsch (Yaron Kaminsky)