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The
moment the second Lebanon war ended, and in fact even before that, a
difficult and grim question emerged: What happened to our great, mighty
army? Why is it that 40 years ago it managed to beat the armies of three
states in a matter of days, while this time around it failed to defeat a
small military force despite getting plenty of time to accomplish the
mission?
Various answers have been presented. One of them has to do with
personalities: The prime minister is brash, the defense minister is a
rookie, and the chief of staff is arrogant. A second answer has to do
with the state of the army: It wasn`t trained to achieve the war`s
objectives. We can find more answers for this bothersome question, and
the debate over it will continue for a long time, attesting to the depth
of the crisis in the wake of this war.
However, the decisive answer is unrelated to concrete, current-day
developments, but rather, to the basic process taking place in the IDF.
This process started many years ago, immediately following the Six Days
War.
What kind of army do we want?
The results of that war forced the IDF to deal with a new mission, which
is not military but rather police-like: Governing over the hundreds of
thousands residing in the new territories that were occupied. In the
early years, when the absurd phrase `enlightened occupation` was
commonly accepted, the army attempted to remain largely uninvolved in
residents` live and didn`t have to deploy large forces for policing
missions.
In the 1980s the situation changed because of two reasons: One – the
process of establishing settlements at the heart of the West Bank that
began at this time. The army was forced to deploy large forces to
protect them, and particularly the small and isolated communities that
featured more soldiers than settlers. The defense minister at the time,
Yitzhak Rabin, described the situation angrily: `When there`s a ballet
class at one of the settlements, I need to dispatch an IDF company to
guard it.`
Beyond this, settler leaders became the army`s masters in practice. They
had the political power to annul inconvenient military decisions.
The second reason was the outbreak of the first Intifada. Until then,
the military price for maintaining the occupation was relatively low,
but since then it has grown increasingly steeper and increasingly
intolerable. The phrase `steep price` has two implications: The first is
a simple one: The number of units dealing with policing duties has grown
at a huge rate. Until then, only one brigade was able to control the
entire Judea and Samaria region. By now, a whole division is needed. The
second meaning is deeper and more complex: The change in the nature of
military missions. Even before that the army was dealing with
magnificent operations such as searches, arrests, and the occasional
curfews, but since then, those have became a significant part of its
missions.
In the distant past, phrases and terms such as `the best ones to flight
school,` military posts, strongholds, and ambushes symbolized the IDF.
Today, the clear symbol of the army`s activity is the roadblock. The
world of values such checkpoints stem from attests to the corrupt and
dangerous process taking place in the army. Soldiers whose time was
dedicated to defending one radical settlement or another and screening
miserable Palestinians at some remote roadblock are unable to really
deal with missions related to Israeli security.
We saw and learned this bitter truth back in the first Lebanon war –
back then we already grasped occupation`s terrible price. And now,
another cursed war raises the simple question: What do we want – a
defense force or a roadblock force?
Professor Yechiam Weitz heads the Land of Israel Studies Department at
the University of Haifa
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