JERUSALEM - As a ceasefire went into
effect on Monday between Israel and Hezbollah and
a tense calm descended on the region, Israelis
were wondering whether the truce would hold, and
were beginning to ask questions about what they
had gained - or lost - during the 33 days of
fighting.
As the ceasefire began, Israelis
in northern Israel began emerging from their bomb
shelters where they have spent much of the past
month, as it appeared that Hezbollah had halted
its daily barrage of rockets on towns across
northern Israel.
But for Israelis, the
litmus test in the coming days will be to what
extent the United Nations ceasefire resolution,
which calls for the deployment of an international
force and the Lebanese army in
south Lebanon, and the
removal of Hezbollah from the area, is
implemented.
Cabinet ministers, who voted
overwhelmingly in favor of the resolution, with
only one minister out of 25 abstaining, have
publicly praised the terms they say the government
extracted during tough ceasefire negotiations, but
privately many are skeptical over whether they can
actually be implemented.
Israel's
insistence on staying put in south Lebanon until
an international force deploys, to ensure
Hezbollah does not re-establish itself in the
area, was accepted by the UN. But the Israeli
military is concerned that Hezbollah fighters will
carry out attacks on soldiers on the ground. In
the 12 hours after the ceasefire went into effect,
six Hezbollah fighters were killed in clashes with
Israeli troops.
Israeli Foreign Minister
Tzipi Livni said on Monday that Israel would not
countenance a situation in which its soldiers
became "sitting ducks". But Hezbollah leader
Hassan Nasrallah made it clear that the Shi'ite
organization would continue targeting Israeli
troops as long as they remained on Lebanese soil.
The longer Israeli troops stay on the
ground, the more confrontations there will be with
Hezbollah fighters, and violence could again
escalate, threatening the nascent ceasefire.
Israeli military chiefs have recommended
to the political leadership that if the ceasefire
holds, then troops should be pulled out of south
Lebanon as quickly as possible. This will also
depend on how quickly the Lebanese army and
foreign troops are deployed in the area.
With a political battle beginning to erupt
in Israel over the outcome of the fighting, Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert addressed lawmakers in
parliament on Sunday, telling them that Hezbollah
had been dealt a "harsh blow" and that a situation
in which "a terrorist organization is allowed to
act inside a state as an arm of the axis of evil"
no longer existed. Israel's offensive, he said,
had changed the "strategic balance" in the region
in its favor.
But speaking after Olmert,
opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, the head of
the right-wing Likud Party, said the goals set out
by the government "weren't achieved". Two abducted
Israeli soldiers, he said, had not been released,
Hezbollah had not been disarmed, and the missile
threat posed by Hezbollah had not been eradicated.
Some cabinet ministers were more
circumspect than the prime minister. Livni told
reporters that the UN resolution was "the best
that could be extracted from the Security Council"
and that it "could bring about the disarming of
Hezbollah".
The major achievement for
Israel, she said, was the expansion of UNIFIL
(United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) that has
been in south Lebanon since 1978 to 15,000 troops
(from 2,000) and the fact that the ceasefire
resolution authorized it to use force to impose
its authority.
Israeli leaders have always
been skeptical about the effectiveness of an
international peacekeeping force, and that
skepticism has not disappeared in the wake of the
truce agreement.
When asked why Israel had
gone ahead with a massive ground push after a
ceasefire resolution had already been adopted by
the Security Council, Foreign Ministry spokesman
Mark Regev replied that Israel wanted to weaken
Hezbollah as much as possible in south Lebanon
before handing the area over to an international
force.
"The logic would be that even in
the framework of this successful outcome, if you
hand over to the Lebanese army a cleaner south
Lebanon, a south Lebanon where you have Hezbollah
removed from the territory, that makes their [the
Lebanese] troubles a lot easier," he said.
While Hezbollah's abduction of two Israeli
soldiers on July 12 on Israel's northern border
triggered the fighting, their release was not
included as a condition for implementation of the
ceasefire. Instead, a call for them to be freed
was included in the preamble to the resolution.
Olmert reportedly told the soldiers' parents on
Sunday that he would begin negotiations for their
release.
Cognizant of the growing calls
for an inquiry into how the military campaign was
conducted, Olmert told lawmakers on Monday that
there were "shortcomings" and that they would have
to be "reviewed".
He may have to agree to
more than that, especially if there is growing
public discontent over the manner in which the
political and military leadership managed the
offensive. While believing the military offensive
was fully justified, some politicians have already
begun calling for a state commission of inquiry
into what they believe was a poorly managed
campaign.
Did the military rely too
heavily on the air force in the first days of the
fighting? Why did the army wait so long to launch
a massive ground assault aimed at stopping the
rocket fire on northern Israel? And why, once a
ceasefire had been achieved, did Olmert order a
massive ground operation? Why were reserve
soldiers lacking basic equipment? Why did soldiers
not always have enough food to eat in the field?
Why were the bomb shelters in many northern towns
in such a poor state as to render them
uninhabitable?
Why did the government not
provide for the basic needs of those people who
remained in the north and did not travel south out
of range of the rockets? Why did the government
not organize accommodation in areas out of range
of the rockets for those residents of northern
Israel who wanted to leave but did not have the
means to do so?
These are just some of the
questions that Israel's political and military
leadership will have to answer in the coming weeks
and months.
Already political commentators
in the Israeli media are weighing in over who
should shoulder responsibility for how the
campaign was managed. In an article titled "Olmert
must go", columnist Ari Shavit wrote on the front
page of the Ha'aretz daily that "you cannot lead
an entire nation to war promising victory, produce
humiliating defeat and remain in power".
But writing in Ha'aretz subsequently, in
an article "Olmert must stay", diplomatic
columnist Akiva Eldar argued that despite the
prime minister's mistakes, "the war has not been
in vain".
Commending Olmert for accepting
the UN-brokered ceasefire agreement as a
"courageous decision to buck a large majority of
the public, as well as the generals and pundits
who argued against the ceasefire", Eldar wrote
that the prime minister "appears to have learned
that it is important to reach peace agreements
with those neighbors who are interested in leading
normal lives - even if this requires giving up
'victory', even if it requires giving up real
estate".
