WarSclerotic

There are several reasons for the move. First and foremost is the continued Israeli effort to bolster its deterrence in face of Hizbullah and its continued military buildup in Lebanon. The deterrence, created by the Second Lebanon War in 2006 as well as by the assassination in 2008 of Hizbullah military commander Imad Mughniyeh, is something that needs to be maintained on a regular basis.

The declassification of the highly sensitive intelligence sends a strong and clear message to Hizbullah that the IDF knows what it is doing in southern Lebanon and where its military installations are located. Also, the chances that Hizbullah will move its assets are deemed slim.

“There is too much to move,” one senior officer explained.

The second effect the IDF is hoping to achieve is diplomatic. In recent weeks, leading up to the war’s fourth anniversary, the IDF launched a diplomatic campaign aimed at educating the international community about Hizbullah’s military buildup ahead of the next war and the consequences that strategy entails.

In June, Brig.-Gen. Yossi Heiman, head of the IDF’s Strategic Planning Department, flew to UN headquarters and presented the evidence to UN officials. A few weeks later, the Northern Command’s chief intelligence officer, Col. Ram, presented the evidence to UNIFIL commander Maj.-Gen. Alberto Asarta Cuevas.

“The world needs to understand that Hizbullah is deliberately positioning its military positions inside civilian centers, and that this strategy has consequences,” a top IDF officer said.

The IDF has said in the past that it will respond disproportionately to a new Hizbullah attack, and that each of the 160 villages in southern Lebanon where the guerrilla group has established its positions will be targeted.

The release of the information on Wednesday also reflects an IDF understanding that the Goldstone Report, which came out following Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip last year, was partially a result of Israel’s failure to properly prepare the world for what would happen in the event of an Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip.

This happened again with the flotilla to the Gaza Strip on May 31 and the navy’s boarding of the Mavi Marmara Turkish passenger ship, which ended with nine Turkish men dead after they attacked the IDF commandos.

Then, too, the IDF admitted that it should have, in advance of the operation, invested resources in preparing the public for the possibility that people would be killed.

This does not mean that a war with Hizbullah is around the corner – just that the IDF is preparing for one. The chance of a war with Hizbullah this summer is low, according to the IDF’s assessment.

Hizbullah is scared of what Israel’s response would be, and concerned about the effect a new war would have on its standing within Lebanon.

By making this sensitive information public, Israel runs the risk of revealing its intelligence-gathering procedures and giving Hizbullah the opportunity to adapt. Nevertheless, that risk was taken, as part of a laudable new IDF strategy geared toward confronting Israel’s rapidly changing military challenges.

In the past, wars were fought by uniformed soldiers on battlefields often far from civilian population centers.

Israel consistently prevailed in these conventional conflicts against Arab states and against the Palestinian militias that sought to destroy the Jewish state, from the 1948 War of Independence and through to the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Realizing they were unable to defeat Israel in this way, Palestinians in south Lebanon and in Gaza, and their supporters, shifted first to the strategy of terrorism, and more recently, with Iranian inspiration, have gradually perfected an asymmetrical form of violence.

Cynically manipulating the instinctive aversion to the death of noncombatants, and exploiting a lacuna in outdated international law formulated when conventional wars were the only reality, Hizbullah and Hamas terrorists place themselves and their weapons in the heart of populated residential areas and launch rocket fire from there against Israel’s civilian population. When Israel is forced to come to the defense of its citizens, noncombatants on the enemy side, cynically placed in the line of fire by Hamas and Hizbullah, are unfortunately killed.

International criticism to date, based on the anachronistic Fourth Geneva Convention, has largely singled out Israel, the party responding to attack, for the ostensibly disproportionate killing of non-combatants. The result is castigation in the shape, for instance, of the Goldstone Report, which accused Israel of committing war crimes during Operation Cast Lead. In this distorted moral climate, Israel is gradually losing the legitimacy to defend itself – being expected, apparently, to indefinitely absorb civilian losses and live under constant threat of missile attacks from both Gaza and Lebanon, two fronts where it dismantled its presence in “occupied” territory and withdrew to borders demarcated by the international community.

THIS WEEK’S release of information shows Israel trying a new tactic. When pictures of war casualties in Lebanon or Gaza are relayed across the world and Israel is accused of disproportionality, few have been willing to listen to Israeli efforts at explaining the context. Now, Israel is adopting a preemptive approach – warning the world, ahead of a feared new conflict, of Hizbullah’s diabolical strategy.

According to Prof. Asa Kasher, an expert on military ethics and the author of the IDF’s code of ethics, Hizbullah’s deployment among civilians is “a violation of the spirit of the Geneva Convention.” Israel’s hope is that its newly revealed information will gain international attention, and it will be appreciated that it is Hizbullah’s leaders who are violating international law, not the IDF.

There is also the hope that the residents of the 160 southern Lebanese villages caught up in Hizbullah’s web may register their concern, one way or another, about living next to an arms cache or a missile stockpile now that they know that the IDF likely has it targeted.

In June, Brig.-Gen. Yossi Heiman, head of the IDF’s Strategic Planning Department, presented evidence of Hizbullah’s immoral deployment to UN officials. UNIFIL commander in Lebanon Maj.-Gen. Alberto Asarta Cuevas was also briefed.

With the UN dominated by states that are both hypercritical of Israel and unwilling or unable to make moral distinctions between democracies and dictatorships, it is highly unlikely that any significant public acknowledgement of Hizbullah’s moral abuses will be forthcoming.

But the IDF is right to make the effort. Indeed, it needs to broaden its outreach, and ensure that this information is made available as widely as possible – to the media, no matter how unenthusiastic the reception, and in smaller briefings for key politicians and officials.

Many of the same moral dilemmas faced by Israel in Gaza and in Lebanon are being faced by the US, Canada, Italy, Germany and other NATO armies in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Western armies should compare and share their counterinsurgency doctrines in an attempt to develop both strategies and a military ethics code to deal with the new ruthlessness they face.

Where south Lebanon is concerned, nobody can now say that they weren’t warned about the nature of the looming confrontation.

The impressionable Levy may not have been too difficult to win over, but the Israeli mainstream – battered, bloodied and instinctively cynical these days about peace prospects – is a rather tougher nut to crack, particularly when the message is that familiar one about narrow windows of opportunity, Palestinian willingness to make concessions, and the need to overcome fear in order to achieve change and lasting security.

But Obama – who carefully dropped seemingly casual references to the Jewish concept of “tikkun” and to his visits to the Western Wall into the conversation – likely took at least a partial step toward reeling in our skeptical public with a performance that was focused, well-prepared and engaging.

This was his first Israeli TV interview since he won the presidency, and his first interview with the Israeli media since he sat down with this writer in Jerusalem as mere Democratic frontrunner Obama in July 2008.

And while I was struck, in that conversation two years ago, by what I wrote then was his “explicit and unsympathetic” attitude to the matter of West Bank settlements – he told me that Israel would have to consider whether “getting that buffer [of an expanded Israel] is worth the antagonism of the other party” – it seems equally significant that he was so vague and non-confrontational when the same issue was raised by Levy.

The president told her he didn’t want to be “disingenuous” and to claim that there were no differences between him and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. But, he went on amiably, the US and Israel had always differed over settlements, and the US position was formulated only in the belief that it would help ensure a strong, secure Israel. He easily dodged her direct question about extending the 10-month settlement moratorium, and steered gently away instead to declare, unarguably, that if only the direct talks could get started, they would hopefully produce the kind of growing Israeli-Palestinian trust that would enable all kinds of knotty issues to be addressed more productively.

The president ticked all the right boxes – stressing his “sympathy and identity” with the Jewish experience; disarmingly acknowledging that his middle name “Hussein” might prompt suspicion, then offsetting that by naming his senior Jewish advisers; and noting that thwarting Iran’s nuclear drive had been his “No. 1 foreign policy priority.” He also astutely praised Netanyahu as a leader “not perceived as a dove” and all the more capable of peacemaking as a consequence.

The only slightly sour moment was his musing over whether some Israelis’ wariness of him had been caused by his outreach to the Muslim world, and the cliché he invoked about the critics who wrongly believe that “the friend of my enemy must be my enemy.”

For in truth, of course, we Israelis would like to think that we and he share precisely the same friends and precisely the same enemies, and our concern has sometimes been that he was simply not as experienced as we are at separating the one from the other.

Perhaps most importantly of all in this masterly performance, the president, when urging a more flexible attitude to peacemaking from the Israeli public, did so with a commendable effort at empathy: “The Israeli people are going to have to overcome legitimate skepticism,” he said, and “more than legitimate fears,” in order to achieve the breakthrough that would enable long-term security.

“Legitimate skepticism.” “More than legitimate fears.” One could imagine Israelis nationwide nodding their heads at that language, beginning to concede that this leader does actually understand something of what we’ve been going through.

Two years ago, candidate Obama and I had discussed his pledge to work for an Israeli-Palestinian accommodation from the moment he was sworn in, if he was sworn in. Obviously, it is unfortunate he didn’t conduct the kind of interview he gave to Channel 2 right at the start of his presidency.

But it’s a safe bet that a watching Israel was overwhelmingly gratified that he has done so now.

Top Israeli delegations recently traveled to Jordan and Egypt for high-level talks with the political and security echelons on a widerange of issues including the Iranian nuclear threat.

Official: Urgency growing in both countries

One official, who was familiar with the content of the talks, said that in both countries there was a sense of “urgency” regarding the need to stop Iran’s nuclear progress.

“The urgency is growing in both countries since Iran’s nuclear program is continuing,” the official said.

Amman’s concern centers on the possibility that a nuclear Iran would provide an umbrella for opposition groups within Jordan such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

Cairo is also challenged by Teheran’s nuclear development.

In April, 26 men were convicted of spying for Hizbullah and plotting attacks in Egypt.

The group was charged with planning attacks on tourists and shipping in the Suez Canal, and sending operatives and explosives to Gaza to aid terrorists there.

Cells are a direct ‘challenge to Mubarak’s regime’

The discovery of the cells, the official said, was seen as a direct challenge from Iran to President Hosni Mubarak’s regime.

While the increased concern in Amman and Cairo is not voiced publicly, the senior defense official said that it was helpful for Israel in garnering international support to stop Iran’s nuclear program.

“While there is not much that Jordan and Egypt can do to stop Iran, it is important for the United States and countries in Europe to hear that they, too, are concerned with Iran’s nuclear program,” the official said.