Death as a Way of Life

Leave Lebanon Now

February 2000

Ehud Barak promised, as part of his election campaign, to withdraw the Israeli Army from southern Lebanon within a year — after eighteen years of occupation. Grassroots organizations persisted in their pressure on the government to fulfill this controversial promise.

Six Israeli soldiers have been killed by Hezbollah attacks in Lebanon in ten days. The Israeli government has decided on a tough response. Israeli air force fighter planes have bombed power plants deep inside Lebanese territory. Hezbollah has continued to attack Israeli outposts in southern Lebanon, and a flare-up seems imminent.

But, in fact, it doesn’t really matter what Israel’s tough response in Lebanon will be. The entire process is preordained, and it is only an illusion to believe that Israel controls or initiates any part of it.

Time and time again, for over twenty years now, our leaders have brought us to a Lebanese blind alley in which we are forced to act precisely contrary to our interests.

This time, too, apparently, we will react the same way. We’ll once again behave like the drowning man whose frantic flailing sucks him deeper and deeper into the water.

Why does it have to be this way? Why does it sometimes seem as if we Israelis are doomed to make this error by our very nature? That it’s the result of our too finely honed instincts, which in the end bring more and more disasters upon us?

We do not acknowledge the failure of our continued, pointless presence in Lebanon. We are not admitting that our deterrent force decays further with each additional day there. We do not accept that there is no military solution to the Lebanon problem. Instead of facing up boldly to these facts, it’s much easier for us to turn our frustration and humiliation into a great fist and to strike out, hard.

But when you look back today on the many years during which our soldiers have participated in this bloody ritual, your heart breaks. It’s the thought that perhaps most of the retaliatory operations were no more than superfluous and dangerous acts of revenge, an automatic outlet for the well-known overconfidence of military men — as well as of politicians who were once military men — who know no other way but force.

Yes, we realize that they are undoubtedly levelheaded, responsible, sober men, but what’s to be done if their sobriety and levelheadedness prompt them to take two or three steps that repeat themselves in a sort of mechanical routine? At most, they can “suspend” or “examine” their response until what seems to them an appropriate moment, and then, as usual, they react with force and aggression, and recommence for the thousandth time the vicious, bloody circle.

But how is it possible, ask many Israelis who have already come to terms with the idea of a withdrawal, how can we leave this way, with our tail between our legs? How can we allow Hezbollah to humiliate us so?

Because, the answer is, there is no longer any alternative. We’ve got to get out. It’s not important how the retreat is called, or what other people may call it. In any case, we should keep in mind that this won’t be the first time that Israeli soldiers have left Lebanon without completing their mission. In 1986, after four years of plodding slowly through the Lebanese mud, Israel withdrew from Lebanon, finally understanding that the price it was paying in human life was too high.

Nor is there any longer a genuine need to deal with the “public relations” of such a withdrawal. Everyone, in Israel and the world, knows the truth. Israel will be able to exert its deterrent force far better from within its borders, yet with a much greater sense of justice and in national unity. We must do it now.

Get out. Because we are conquerors, and because throughout history an army that was stationed in an occupied land, imprisoned for all intents and purposes in outposts and trenches, has never succeeded in fighting for any length of time against mobile forces, even if much less powerful.

Get out. Because the army of a democratic country, whose actions are restricted by law and by accepted moral norms, can never defeat a guerrilla army fighting for its land, supported by the local population, knowing that justice is on its side.

Get out. Not because Hezbollah is a fairer or more moral adversary than we are. It is an organization that cynically trades in the body parts of its enemies, that has no compunctions about using women and children as human shields in shooting attacks, and that does not hesitate to launch indiscriminate attacks on civilian settlements over the border. But Israel’s position against Hezbollah will be much more determined and ethical if it redeploys on the international border, ends the state of occupation, and denies every enemy the right to act against it. If, after the withdrawal, Hezbollah attacks the inhabitants of northern Israel, Israel will have every right to act against Lebanon, a sovereign country.

Get out. Because, in doing so, Israel will deny President Assad his main bargaining card — his ability to use Hezbollah as a proxy to attack Israel’s soldiers and so apply intolerable pressure on Israel during the negotiations over Israel’s withdrawl from the Golan Heights.

Get out. Not in July, which Prime Minister Barak has set as his target date. After all, July is just an arbitrary and artificial deadline set a year ago as part of Barak’s election campaign. If it can be done in July, why can’t it be done next week? Why not start the retreat today?

Get out. Evacuate the outposts, bring our soldiers home, redeploy on the border. Get out. Swallow our dubious pride. Stop feeding the miserable hubristic fire within us with ever more young soldiers. Every soldier killed now is an unnecessary victim of military arrogance. The same is true of every Lebanese civilian who is hurt. We need to state explicity: It’s not the doubts and protests being heard on Israel’s home front that are destroying the Israeli Army’s chances of success there. It’s the sense of error and pointlessness, and the feeling that the fighting will never end.

Get out. We began this war defeated, and if Barak gets us out now, it will be his first great victory as prime minister. But to achieve that, he will have to recognize that we’ve lost this war. We are defeated. We can say it out loud — and not die of it.

Of that you don’t die.

On May 22, 2002, Israel withdrew its forces back to the international border with Lebanon in a quick forty-eight hour operation — two months before the original deadline set for withdrawal by Barak.