A long quiet
Op-ed: After a decade of quiet on Israel's northern border with Lebanon, a border which has never seen quiet for such a length of time in Israel's history, Eitan Haber argues that perhaps we should be thanking Olmert and his cabinet for their leadership during the war.
Israel is marking a decade since the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War, and people are still asking if this quiet was "worth" that confusing war. Excuse the cliché phrase that "there is no just war," but the time has come to say that this war is included in this definition. Even if the IDF learned several important lessons, such as the fact that the IDF was not prepared to fight against a guerilla force, and the fact that the IDF was not prepared to deal with the damage caused to the civilian population.
There is no war to end all wars, and if there was one, it should be started immediately. Not every war ends with a peace treaty and forced friendship – like in World War II. There is also no war which will end all war with Israel. This type of war is the wet dream of a large portion of the Muslim world, a war which would see Israel wiped off the map. In Israel, we too are mistaken in believing that historic victory after historic victory will put an end to the wars with the Arabs.
That’s how it was at the end of the Six Day war with the Suez Canal. The Egyptians would shoot at Israel from the Egyptian side of the canal, and a certain well known tank commander would feign surprise. These obnoxious people weren't fighting out of patriotism. These small wars such as the War of Attrition are what terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas dream about. A low level conflict. Israel will always be drawn into, and will get out of too late (22 days for the Second Lebanon War, and 51 days for Operation Protective Edge.)
There are those who say that the Second Lebanon War was "worth" the heavy price due to the thousands of peaceful and quiet nights on the northern border, a border which has never known quiet like this before. This would have been true had Hezbollah been sitting idly by after the war ended. Israel would have been publishing op-eds similar to what was published before the Yom Kippur War (a famous headline from that time, "The Egyptian guns are rusting from lack of use).
But we can't forget that Hezbollah has armed itself with tens of thousands of precision rockets and mortars and have thousands of soldiers who are practicing their fighting skills and gaining experience in Syria. They have promised us that we will forget all about the last 10 years of quiet once they fire the first rocket from Lebanon, and we will forget about the quiet even more so when the rockets arrive in salvos. So says the Hezbollah leader who has been too afraid to step out of his bunker for the past decade.
The conclusion is that Israel can and must go to war only once the knife is at our throat, and we must know from the beginning that there's no such thing as a tactical war, just big wars. While it's true that Zionism lives on the short intervals whereby our enemies are sitting by idly and stupidly, they are slowly but surely getting smarter.
Yet despite everything that’s been written here – and I'm guessing that this sentence won't comfort the bereaved families – we must thank Olmert, Perez, and Halutz for a decade of quiet. It's something.
