Finally, Israel admits Hezbollah’s victory in Lebanon

The most significant result of the recent conflict in Lebanon is a change to the balance of fear in the Middle East, and this is why Israel has been resisting the fact that its army got defeated by Hezbollah fighters in the war.

But after months of denial, Israel admitted finally that Hezbollah won the war.

Speaking at a Tel Aviv news conference summing up the Israeli army’s investigation of its behavior during the war, Israeli chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, who’s under fire because of the shortcomings of the war, conceded that the military made serious errors during the war. However, he rejected calls to resign as a result, saying only if the committee called for his resignation, he would comply. “I have not heard my superiors calling on me to resign,” he said. “If they do, I will respond.”

Defense Minister Amir Peretz said the same. Although Halutz claimed that Israel badly damaged Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and killed hundreds, he admitted that the IOF, the Israeli Occupation Forces, weren’t “successful in reducing the short-range rocket fire on Israel’s north until the cease-fire.” “We attacked the Katyushas, but unsuccessfully,” General Halutz said, adding he’d stay on “to correct what can be corrected,” and that resigning would be “running away.”

Israel’s military superiority has long enjoyed a near mythic status throughout the Middle East and perhaps the entire wolrd. Endorsing such myth fueled the false claim that force can perpetually substitute for diplomacy.

The world’s unquestioned faith in Israel's military supremacy allowed it avoid concessions and created the assumption that the decision to initiate military aggression in Lebanon would be another step toward reshaping the region, in accordance with Israeli and American interests.

The summer war between the Israeli army and Hezbollah fighters ended in August after UN resolution 1701 asked both parties end fighting and mandated an enlarged and strengthened international peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon and supervision of Lebanon’s seacoast and border with Syria to prevent the rearming of the Lebanese resistance group.

More than 4,000 Hezbollah rockets are believed to have been fired into Israel during the 35-day war, while Israel pounded Lebanon with air strikes, damaging the country’s infrastructure, and killing over 1400 civilians, including women and children. Israel counted 159 fatalities.

It claimed that the dead included 500 Hezbollah fighters- that was never proved.

Critics of General Halutz, who spent his career in the air force, and of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert accused the government of having relied too heavily on air power and delayed sending enough ground troops to the fighting arena to push back Hezbollah fighters.

The huge number of civilian deaths has also cost Israel dearly in terms of international goodwill. Nobody could endorse the claim that the capture of a couple of Israeli soldiers justifies the destruction of an entire country.

Critics also said that the military should be led by a ground forces commander, arguing that reserves were not called up in time, were badly trained and poorly equipped, and that sometimes soldiers faced contradictory orders.

“There were cases in which officers did not carry out their assignments, and cases in which officers objected on moral grounds to their orders,” Halutz said, an apparent reference to resistance against attacking civilian areas in south Lebanon.

General Halutz stated earlier that the Israeli forces fired cluster munitions, with “bomblets” placed in artillery shells, into southern Lebanon in contradiction of his orders that they be aimed only at specific targets.

Halutz moreover said it was a mistake to set the release of two Israeli soldiers, who were captured by Hezbollah in a cross-border raid on July 12, as a goal for the war.

Lebanon war was long planned and encouraged in cooperation with the Bush administration.

Following the expected result of the war, the majority of the political analysts agreed that Israel has suffered the first defeat in its history, deeply wounding the new government, led by Olmert.

Hezbollah fighters, who succeeded in giving a major slap to one of the most powerful armies in the world, proved the bankruptcy of the logic of force.

Israel's defeat is expected to set the stage for an environment in which it is forced to return to the negotiating table and return the lands it captured in violation of UN resolutions since 1967, the only way, according to experts, to co-exist with its neighbors in peace. (Source: Aljazeera.com)