A Cautionary Tale

Haim Watzman, writing in the Washington Post has a cautionary tale for Israel. Watzman served in the Israeli Defense Force in Lebanon during the first Israeli invasion in 1982. In fact he served several years there. One day, Watzman went for a run:

This is the most idiotic thing you've ever done, I remember telling myself. It was 1983. I was a 26-year-old infantryman with Israel's occupying force in Lebanon, and a perfect target for kidnappers. Any of the ancient cars rumbling by could have contained guerrillas. I could have been stuffed in a trunk and smuggled across the frontier into enemy hands. In violation of standing orders, my commanding officer had approved my 30-minute run. If you're more than five minutes late, he warned, we'll assume you've been captured.

If I had been, every Israeli army radio in the occupation's eastern sector would have crackled with the codeword — Hannibal — indicating the abduction of an Israeli soldier. Soldiers would be roused from bed. Patrols would rush to pre-assigned locations. Armored personnel carriers would block escape routes. While running, I felt a perverse sense of power, knowing two divisions stood ready to find me.

Today, with one Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in the Gaza Strip and two others by Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel has responded with airstrikes, naval blockades and ground action. As a soldier, Hannibal gave me confidence and boosted morale among my comrades. And today, I believe that deploying our military to stop Hezbollah's rocket attacks and to obtain the return of our troops is fully justified.

However, I fear that we might not stop there, and that we might succumb to the delusion that military action can transform Lebanon's political and social realities. That same delusion led Israel to occupy Lebanon for an agonizing decade and a half in which hundreds of our troops — and many more Lebanese and Palestinians — were killed.

I went running that spring day because I was desperate for exercise after days cooped up at our mountain outpost. But my run was also a small act of protest. Caught in what I considered a wrongheaded war, I was flouting standing orders and common sense.

We were occupying Lebanon, but Lebanon had become our captor.

After settling in Israel in 1978, my first home was in Kiryat Shmonah, a town near the Lebanese border. A few years earlier, Palestinian terrorists had crossed over and killed 18 residents in an apartment building there, including nine children. Every two or three weeks, Palestine Liberation Organization guerrillas fired Katyusha rockets on our town and other northern settlements. Time and again, Israeli forces swept into southern Lebanon to clean out the terrorist bases. Eventually, however, the bases would regroup and the attacks would resume.

The article is wonderfully written and really should be read. Watzman is angry at Hezbollah but wary that Israel could fall into the same trap he found himself in. The situation is different today, but has many of the same elements. When Watzman was part of the invasion, the enemy was made up of Palestinian terrorists. Now it is Iranian backed Lebanese Shia Hezbollah. But the similarities are there nonetheless. As are the traps.