The massive public support for Operation Change of Direction reminds me of the joke about the opera singer who is endlessly cheered and applauded until someone in the audience gets up and says: "We won't let you off the stage until you learn how to sing." Most Israelis continue to back the government and the army despite the fact that Israel is being battered by 100-200 rockets a day from Metulla to Haifa. It's a nightmare beyond anything we could have imagined.
The Israeli public is patriotic to the core, but it is also known to be fickle. One morning, it may suddenly get up and ask some awkward questions in the cost-benefit department. Are the outcomes of this government-initiated operation worth having Kiryat Shmona flattened into a parking lot for? Do they justify watching the beautiful Galilee go up in flames? What about turning a million and a half citizens into refugees in their own land and locking them up in bomb shelters?
At the moment, only media commentators have begun to turn up their noses. But it won't take much for the applause to turn into boos. Lebanon does not have a good reputation in Israeli collective memory.
How symbolic that on the most intense days of fighting, the chief of staff came down with stomach pains and had to be rushed to the hospital. The chief of staff is not the only one with a stomachache around here. This whole operation, from the way decisions were reached to the way they have been carried out, raises some discomfiting questions about the judgment of our politicians and generals.
Since Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon six years ago, Hezbollah has raced like crazy to arm itself, becoming a frontline for Iran and a strategic threat to Israel. Its men have practiced on maps of Israel drawn in the sand, with the Iranian mantra of Israel's destruction etched on their banner. The question is what Israel's governments have done over the past six years to deal with this threat taking shape before their eyes.
Hezbollah has been sitting right on our border, close enough to see the whites of their eyes, kidnapping soldiers and engaging in provocations that have brought Israel to the point of bargaining over prisoner release deals. That in itself has been interpreted as weakness. Israel has been unforgivably negligent in allowing Hezbollah to breed and multiply, dig itself in and build up its arsenals.
The governments of Israel never anticipated that one fine day we would find ourselves in a frontal war with all of southern Lebanon. Otherwise, why wasn't the home front prepared for war? Why was there no assessment of how feisty Hezbollah would be in battle? Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the first war in which we haven't seen meek Arab POWs in blindfolds and handcuffs. We are tangling here with soldiers who have been trained to fight to the death. What was Ehud Olmert thinking, in those Churchillian speeches of his, when he told us Hezbollah would think twice before firing missiles? Think twice? The very next morning, they launched 210.
The Hezbollah attack warranted a tough response. The question is what the objectives were when the fighting began to assume war proportions. Either the government didn't define its goals properly, or the army didn't deliver the goods. When you embark on the kind of comprehensive, all-out war that Olmert had in mind, you don't throw one shoe and then remember you should have thrown the other one, too.
The army has been activated in stages, maybe because our left-leaning defense minister was hesitant about a large-scale land offensive, or maybe because the army thought the job could be wrapped up by the air force destroying half of Lebanon. More than two weeks passed before the reserves were mobilized and a massive ground force was sent in to create a sterile zone wide enough for the day when a cease-fire goes into effect and a multinational force, in cooperation with the Lebanese Army, will take the torch from our hands.
No one is talking about victory. But with all the criticism of the media, the commentators and the military experts, it could be that we don't fully appreciate how powerfully Hezbollah has been hit, and what this will do in the long run to weaken it as Iran's frontline force against Israel.
This war is being waged in fits and starts, but for us it remains a justified war - as long as we end it as quickly as possible and stay on top, without sinking into the lethal quagmire of Lebanon.
