Opinion - Editorials

A damning indictment

No one can deny that the Winograd commission, which enquired into Israel's aggression against its northern neighbour in 2006, has done a commendable job — so much so that even Hizbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has been unstinting in his praise. In its interim report on the initial phase of the Second Lebanon war — as the aerial pounding and ground invasion has come to be called — the commission held that the entire political and military leadership failed to exercise due judgment. The panel, headed by a retired judge, Eliyahu Winograd, reserved its severest criticism for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert: "A leader who sends his army into an extensive military operation has an obligation to the country, the fighters...who risk their lives, and the citizens both of Israel and Lebanon. These obligations include an in-depth analysis of the necessity for a military move, its timing and its nature, and of the chances of its success. We saw that the rash decisions to go to war made by the government...did not meet these conditions." The Israeli Prime Minister, the panel added witheringly, believed "the most important decision he had to make was to dare to act militarily." In indicting the government for going to war for unobtainable objectives without a clear plan, the panel followed in the footsteps of earlier commissions of enquiry that held nothing back while exposing the failures of Israeli regimes.

The Winograd commission cannot be faulted for failing to address the larger question thrown up by the war for the simple reason that its mandate did not extend that far. What needs to be challenged in a truth-seeking exercise is Israel's assumption that to achieve security or peace it must be perennially ready to initiate aggressive action against all perceived enemies. This assumption underlay the decision to launch a war that killed hundreds of people and reduced much of south Lebanon to rubble — all for the sake of rescuing two kidnapped soldiers from Hizbollah. The military action was undertaken even though there was a good chance that the Lebanese and other Arab governments could have persuaded the militia to release its captives. As an independent and insightful Israeli commentator has observed, if the government failed to "examine alternatives to military action," it was because "this option does not exist in our country's lexicon." This is the crux of the problem Israel poses as a West Asian state. There are courageous Israelis, including politicians and intellectuals, who believe there are alternatives to military action — but unfortunately, given the paranoid style of politics, their voices and influence do not make up a critical mass.

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