Our fill of restraint

After all the recent events, neither the defense minister nor the chief of staff, the main opponents of action in the Gaza Strip, can delay it much longer. We have had our fill of restraint. But it is not the intolerable suffering of the residents of the Western Negev that is the most worrisome component of this restraint. Rather, it is the reasons that the defense minister, who in this matter is in agreement with the chief of staff and most of the officers of the General Staff, are opposed to action that will lift the immediate nightmare from civilians in the south and the indirect suffering of everyone in Israel.

The first signs of the strategy of restraint (known after going through the language laundromat as "containment") appeared back in the Yom Kippur War and reached new heights during the present decade's war on terror and helplessness in the face of Hamas. The Israel Defense Forces has given up its main ethos and has become a defensive army that mainly protects itself.

In the war on terror it operates according to the distorted "containment strategy," which is mainly avoiding initiatives that could get soldiers hurt, even if this means more civilian casualties. The result: The number of civilians hurt, whether within or over the Green Line, has been more than double that of soldiers. Soldiers, even if they were not in action, were not allowed to travel in non-bullet-proofed vehicles. The wives and children of career-army personnel who lived in the territories traveled - and some were even hurt - on dangerous roads, while their husbands were taken (and agreed to travel!) in armored vehicles.

Ehud Barak was defense minister, then, too. It was during his tenure that the IDF's twilight period began in terms of values (among other things, the Madhat Yusuf affair and Mount Ebal), from which it recovered - very partially, as can be seen from its conduct during the Second Lebanon War and in the Western Negev - during Operation Defensive Shield. That operation, it will be recalled,took pace after voters had had enough of Barak, who did not order the IDF to act even in light of hundreds of victims of suicide bombers. The voters handed Barak one of the harshest defeats in the history of elections in Israel. A similar fate awaits him, now: Not because he is "not nice" and does not communicate, but because he does not act like a leader. The last job in which he applied the motto "those who dare, win," was when he was commander of the Matkal reconnaissance unit. Since that time it is difficult to point out any daring in his military or civilian posts.

The function of an army - how sad it is to have to remind people of this - is, first of all, to protect the lives of civilians. Since the early years of this century, Defense Minister Barak and chief of staff Shaul Mofaz have changed this axiomatic - and moral - concept, and since that time the policy has been weak in terms of values. Therefore the soldiers in army camps in the south have been taken out of Qassam range. The defense minister is studying the statistics and is finding that most of those hurt by Qassams are civilians, and that allows him to take less into consideration the harm to morale, and psychological, economic and strategic damage - not to mention to national honor - in restraint. Although the army knows that reinforcement of buildings increases the motivation of Hamas and Islamic Jihad to attack, it supports reinforcement and its economic and educational costs, so it will not have to act.

Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi knows how much harm restraint does, educationally, to morale and to image, particularly the decline in the image of the army in the eyes of the nation and its enemies. But his fear of casualties outweighs his fear in areas of supreme national importance - which also shows what can be expected of him as supreme commander in an all-out war.

So that rockets will not fall again on the Negev after a full-scale attack, an internal decision must be made and strictly observed: For every infraction of the cease-fire the Hamas leadership will be struck a mortal blow after which it will not be able to command any more barrages on the Negev. Massive military force is not needed to accomplish this. If the nation (and the enemy as well) feels that the government is showing uncompromising determination, it will once again be prepared, despite the fear of an investigative committee, to take risks as in its times of greatness. It will then also go back to directing the main part of its forces and its resources to protecting civilians, rather than itself.